With React 16.8, React Hooks are available in a stable release

I think time will tell.

It's basically the magic vs explicit discussion all over again. Like usually in this discussion, the magic approach is really appealing until it doesn't work, and then the pro-explicit people will go all "told you so" on you.

I personally really prefer explicit, having cut my fingers on magic one time too often. Instead, I'll gladly create classes if the thing I'm making has its own state (of any kind).

In fact I pretty much disagree with the current trend of wanting to shoehorn everything into this idea of declarative and/or functional programming. Especially in a language like JS, functional programming and some cherry-picked ideas from OO mesh really well together. For example, if you allow me to drift a little, did you know that you can add methods to the prototype of an Immutable.Record? You can even use class syntax! More to the point, if there's one place where OO ideas shine, it's UI components. A lot of OO ideas were particularly designed and developed for UIs.

Just like "let" and "const" let me communicate to the reader whether a variable is going to change, I like how in React-land "class" and "function" let me communicate to the reader whether a component has mutable state. Hooks feels like a hack to be able to change the value of a "const" without turning it into a "let". Get over yourself, make it a "let" already.

So for me, Hooks is an attempt to throw the baby out with the bath water. I don't experience the problem it's trying to solve. I like classes when they're appropriate.

I get the argument that custom hooks allow for easier reuse than higher order components, but I think the difference is marginal; you have to wrap your mind around the exact same complexity. Plus I think higher order components themselves are overused, but that's another story.

But! The React people strike me as a rather reasonable bunch. I strongly doubt they're going to move React into a direction where you're forced to make your state (slightly more) implicit. There's too varied a community around React now. I think React with classes and React with hooks can perfectly coexist. Also if my favorite open source React tool adopts hooks and forces me to do the same here and there, then sure I might be grumpy for a few minutes but in the end, well, I'll survive.

Hooks seem to be a drastic change in how we're going to write React components in the future. I'm quite satisfied with the current way of writing components which is to me is very explicit (with no magic). With Hooks React is taking a different direction from their original motto of explicit design patterns. From the looks of it, Hooks seems like a counter-intuitive design pattern but traditionally that's how most of the JS concepts were before they went mainstream.

I'm going to wait and see for some production success stories become giving it serious thought.

> It's basically the magic vs explicit discussion all over again. Like usually in this discussion, the magic approach is really appealing until it doesn't work, and then the pro-explicit people will go all "told you so" on you.

Well... Have any "pro-explicit people" gone all "told you so" about all the magic that's going on with setState?

I don't think so. I don't think it's a binary magic vs explicit choice. I usually lean towards explicit, but as setState demonstrates, it's possible to find some kind of balance where the benefits of the magic outweigh the downsides, or at least are not that bad of a choice.

Hooks are an alternative to HOCs and RPs.

Their bad part is, they add another concept besides components.

Their good part is, they allow to convert non-display components to hooks, which removes the guessing of where the logic is stored.