What I wish I knew about React

React have sold very well the "it's a library" mantra. I find this, at least, bends the difference to build a marketing point around it.

The point they make, and the one everyone writing about React simply repeats, is that "it doesn't give you everything" so you can use it with any other library/framework without trouble. While this claim may be indeed correct, it doesn't mean it's a library. React is a UI framework. It's not a complete Application Framework, sure, and you may mix it with other stuff. In fact, you will generally mix it with other stuff. But I don't think that the difference library vs framework lies in providing for all of the aspects of the application or just for some parts of it.

In this particular case, the author seems to have overstepped that somewhat, saying "With a framework, you’re essentially given all the materials to build that house, and it’s up to you in what arrangement you put them in."

And in there lies the problem. That is not a framework. That's Home Depot. A framework does indeed tell you in what arrangement you're supposed to put the materials. It's in fact this that makes it a framework. It gives you structure. Or at least, the basis for the structure. You put your materials into the arrangement the framework suggests.

React is only concerned with UI, sure. But then again it does give you quite a bit of structure. It does tell you how you're supposed to arrange and build your UI. You extend this class with these methods, or you create this kind of function using these functions in this way. You put your rendering here, and return it in this way... and then the framework will run it.

What is correct is that React is for UI. So, sure, it will not tell you how you should do your API calls. But not because it's not a framework, but because API calls are not a UI concern.

In my 1.5 years or so of using hooks, I'm finding components with hooks subtly more buggy than their class counterparts - there are a lot of gotchas with that dependency array for hooks, I have encountered nasty bugs both with explicitly declaring all of the dependencies in the array and declaring less than them.

It is much easier to accidentally create infinite loops with useEffect that you would never create with class components, and some of the code you write turns out to be more verbose and less expressive, such as when trying to diff previous and current values of state & needing to create extra state variables with useState for each such value you need to react on.

Hooks seem very appealing at first (I lean more FP than OOP in general), but the bugs and slipshod initial rollout out of beta really does not inspire much confidence. Even today I still encounter weird issues.

Amen! A component is like a bag of poop an HOC is a double bagged dog turd with a poorly documented interface

jQuery, when people stop fucking around and start making sites that work again.