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What I wish I knew about React

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Re: What I wish I knew about React

#41

Post by aaronbrethorst »

veeralpatel979 wrote: post #13
dvt wrote: post #8

(Opinionated post ahead...) React is, imo, garbage, but alas it's here to stay -- you know, kind of like Spring or Swing. In 10 years we're going to be wondering how the hell we ever used React 8 hours a day way back then. These kinds of markup frameworks/libraries were touted as jQuery's successor, but, from an architectural point of view, jQuery is by far their superior. "Everything an HTML tag" is an insane mantra…

I love reading about people's first principles technqiues of different technologies on HN! What do you think React will be supplanted by?

HTML is pretty cool.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#42

Post by noahtallen »

irrational wrote: post #22
efdee wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all very, very weird points to raise, except maybe the SSR which is inherently hard to do.

Not if you've been doing web development for a few decades, which I feel the author probably has. I feel like people who came into web development during the past decade really don't understand how much simpler and easier things used to be. It really feels like web development has become crazy complex without much added benefit.

Certainly, the software we write for the browser is much more complex these days. Sure, plenty of website don’t need react and shouldn’t use it. But many of us find react very useful because we are building software with similar creature parity to desktop apps, which wasn’t the case in the early days of the web.

Not only that, but the “simple sites” that used to need a dev to build (like for a local restaurant or business or something) can now be done by the restaurant owner on WordPress.com or Wix or something without much effort

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#43

Post by smt88 »

dvt wrote: post #8

(Opinionated post ahead...) React is, imo, garbage, but alas it's here to stay -- you know, kind of like Spring or Swing. In 10 years we're going to be wondering how the hell we ever used React 8 hours a day way back then. These kinds of markup frameworks/libraries were touted as jQuery's successor, but, from an architectural point of view, jQuery is by far their superior. "Everything an HTML tag" is an insane mantra…

> These kinds of markup frameworks/libraries were touted as jQuery's successor, but, from an architectural point of view, jQuery is by far their superior.

I think everything in this sentence is incorrect.

jQuery started out as syntactic sugar to smooth over the cumbersome and inconsistent DOM manipulation APIs in various browsers.

No one ever seriously says React is a replacement for jQuery. It was a replacement spaghetti-and-meatballs on top of jQuery, Backbone, Knockout, Angular, and whatever other frameworks were popular at the time.

> It's crazy to me that it's normal now to have like 3-4 compilation/transpilation steps when working on a simple JS-based app.

This has nothing to do with React. To get a sane dev environment, you have to do these steps even for a simple site. It's a consequence of browser standards moving slowly and of JS and CSS being awful.

If I can't write front-end code (even for a simple static site) with a decent Webpack flow, TypeScript, and SASS, then I'm doing a lot more work and delivering a lot later. Those tools can be buggy, but most of the time you can just stick with some boilerplate and not end up with anything terrible happening.

> Boy do I miss the days when I was building stuff in PHP and HTML was simply rendered when I ran the damn thing.

You can still do this with PHP (or any other server-side language). It's still a first-class citizen of the .NET world.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#44

Post by dvt »

osdiab wrote: post #30
dvt wrote: post #8

(Opinionated post ahead...) React is, imo, garbage, but alas it's here to stay -- you know, kind of like Spring or Swing. In 10 years we're going to be wondering how the hell we ever used React 8 hours a day way back then. These kinds of markup frameworks/libraries were touted as jQuery's successor, but, from an architectural point of view, jQuery is by far their superior. "Everything an HTML tag" is an insane mantra…

I personally find “the HTML is a function of its inputs, internal state, and nothing else” to be a much more predictable model for writing large web applications than, “anybody anywhere in your code can pull the rug from under you arbitrarily with jQuery”, and for that alone I prefer the React development experience. With Hooks I’m happy in that most of the “business logicky” stuff can be split out into those and my…

> I personally find “the HTML is a function of its inputs, internal state, and nothing else” to be a much more predictable model for writing large web applications than, “anybody anywhere in your code can pull the rug from under you arbitrarily with jQuery”, and for that alone I prefer the React development experience.

Respectfully, that's not at all what HTML is supposed to be, but even so, as it turns out, sometimes you do need state to drill pretty deep down (say you need an icon to be green if you're authenticated). So people started just passing state as props everywhere, but oh no that's an anti-pattern. So now people are using redux, mobx, or the context API to do essentially the exact same thing. Three new tools were developed by dozens of engineers to basically re-invent "global state." It's ludicrous.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#45

Post by efdee »

irrational wrote: post #22
efdee wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all very, very weird points to raise, except maybe the SSR which is inherently hard to do.

Not if you've been doing web development for a few decades, which I feel the author probably has. I feel like people who came into web development during the past decade really don't understand how much simpler and easier things used to be. It really feels like web development has become crazy complex without much added benefit.

I have been doing web development for over two decades now, and honestly things were only simpler if your expectations were much, much lower. If you have the same expectations today, everything is still just as simple.

If you see no added benefit to having your page run in the browser, then by all means do things the old way, and you'll find that even doing the things the old way is today much simpler than it used to be.

If you do want to create a web application that for a large part runs in the browser, I can only see things getting better every year. The perceived added complexity is simply because we are now doing stuff that's more complex.

TL;DR: Building horse carriages was a lot easier than building autonomous cars.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#46

Post by dvt »

andrewstuart wrote: post #28
dvt wrote: post #8

(Opinionated post ahead...) React is, imo, garbage, but alas it's here to stay -- you know, kind of like Spring or Swing. In 10 years we're going to be wondering how the hell we ever used React 8 hours a day way back then. These kinds of markup frameworks/libraries were touted as jQuery's successor, but, from an architectural point of view, jQuery is by far their superior. "Everything an HTML tag" is an insane mantra…

Do you have to work with it? Have you considered getting a different job? (obviously easier before pandemic, but from the sound of it you have been in this boat a while).

I do data engineering these days, but I use React/Vue (and a tiny bit of Angular) fairly regularly on side-projects, at hackathons, etc.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#47

Post by grey-area »

baddox wrote: post #38
irrational wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you've been doing web development for a few decades, which I feel the author probably has. I feel like people who came into web development during the past decade really don't understand how much simpler and easier things used to be. It really feels like web development has become crazy complex without much added benefit.

It’s not more difficult now to make dynamic server-rendered web sites than it was 10 or 20 years ago (I don’t know about PHP these days, but it’s never been easier to start a new Django or Rails app), but your clients will probably want features they’re accustomed to in modern web applications that are not easily implemented in server-rendered web sites.

What kind of features require you to use react?

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#48

Post by ergo14 »

robjan wrote: post #24
cryptica wrote: post #11

>> React is a library, not a framework They say it often but it's not true. React forces you into an entire workflow with JSX, bundling, source mapping, babel transpilation and often restricts you to using components that are designed specifically for React; accessing the raw DOM is nasty business. If it was a library, it would not hijack the DOM and override it with its own; that fact alone is more than enough to ca…

You don't need to use JSX in order to use React; it's just syntactic sugar. https://reactjs.org/docs/react-api.html#createelement

And who uses react without JSX at any scale?

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#49

Post by bryanrasmussen »

dvt wrote: post #8

(Opinionated post ahead...) React is, imo, garbage, but alas it's here to stay -- you know, kind of like Spring or Swing. In 10 years we're going to be wondering how the hell we ever used React 8 hours a day way back then. These kinds of markup frameworks/libraries were touted as jQuery's successor, but, from an architectural point of view, jQuery is by far their superior. "Everything an HTML tag" is an insane mantra…

As a general rule, although not a universal one, markup languages are declarative.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#50

Post by sunaurus »

irrational wrote: post #22
efdee wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all very, very weird points to raise, except maybe the SSR which is inherently hard to do.

Not if you've been doing web development for a few decades, which I feel the author probably has. I feel like people who came into web development during the past decade really don't understand how much simpler and easier things used to be. It really feels like web development has become crazy complex without much added benefit.

I started my career with jQuery, and soon after moved to Angular v1. There was nothing simple about those tools - the mental models involved were complex, different parts of an application were difficult to isolate from each other and optimizing performance was a nightmare.

Compared to all that, React is ridiculously simple - it has a very small API surface, different parts of your app are isolated by default and performance optimization is generally very straightforward. As somebody who really loves simplicity, React is by far my favorite UI library at the moment.

I think when people fondly remember simpler times with jQuery, it's not because jQuery itself was simple, it's just that they remember working on less complex applications.

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