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What I wish I knew about React

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Re: What I wish I knew about React

#91

Post by ddek »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #70
ddek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of a website , I completely agree with you. No blog needs react. Reddit is worse because of react. However, given websites aren’t the only use of react I strongly disagree with your overall sentiment. My organisation uses react in place of desktop apps, and it’s been a game changer for us. We work faster, we train devs faster, deployment is easier, we can painlessly hit everything from desktops through…

This is that moment that proves we’ve made no progress on desktop. In 1990s we had Borland Delphi and CBuilder, in 2000s we had .Net and Qt, now this? How on Earth this is better?

Could you explain why, in terms of the reasons for react I gave in my previous comments, any of your suggestions are better than react?

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#92

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> "Everything an HTML tag" is an insane mantra to have.

JSX isn't HTML, it's an HTML-like syntax for JS (it's essentially XAML for JS), and React doesn't have a mantra of “everything is JSX”. It has a mantra of everything is JS, and some of it is conveniently expressed in JSX. It does strongly favor a declarative, functional style whether it's expressed in the form of JSX or conventional JS syntax.

> SSR. I've brought this point up on HN before, but doing server-side rendering in React is absolutely ridiculous.

Yeah, it's basically a client side SPA library. You can do SSR with it, and it supports it, but that's not really it's happy place.

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

PHP is still around and widely used. If it fits your needs better than React, use it.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#93

Post by grey-area »

mjfisher wrote: post #64
sunaurus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

When people say "web development used to be simpler", they're probably not referring to the front-end tooling (which has certainly improved) - but when most of the functionality of web apps were built and rendered on the back end, with new state being displayed after full page refreshes or simple AJAX calls.

> when most of the functionality of web apps were built and rendered on the back end, with new state being displayed after full page refreshes or simple AJAX calls.

Most websites (including this one for example) still function that way. It works fine. JS frameworks simply are not required for most of the work the web does nowadays - you can add interactivity and immediate feedback where it makes sense very easily with vanilla js.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#94

Post by ivan_gammel »

osdiab wrote: post #65
dvt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, sometime…

What do you think HTML is for? If you want the hypermedia-concept of mostly static documents with links to each other, feel free to turn off Javascript or not use React. If you’re using the web as an application delivery platform that works cross platform without installs and instant updates, then HTML is the base of your UI framework, and as such it helps to have predictability that frameworks like React offer. Re s…

Let’s put it straight: HTML is a Hypertext Markup Language by definition, it’s not an application UI markup language. We are living in a very confused world where inappropriate standard is used just because nothing better got sufficiently big market share. ES, TS, CSS, all the libraries and frameworks in the ecosystem are all just attempts to make the whale fly. For last 20 years we should have been focusing on building semantic web on HTML, while RAD tools should have been standardizing APIs and UIs across platforms on different, probably similarly looking standards (I’d prefer seeing there some DSL with C-like syntax). Unfortunately we have to deal with what we have - jquery, React, Angular etc, the tools that have not invented anything that we haven’t seen yet, but which pretend to be a silver bullet for solving complexity which should not exist in the first place.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#95

Post by ggregoire »

dvcrn wrote: post #83

I am not so up to date with frontend dev but what's with the hate towards React these days? It still does what it's supposed to do very well and very fast. Yeah sure if you want JSX you need transpilation but I would want that anyway if I want any of the ES6 features without losing browser compatibility. And it's also constantly evolving and getting better. Just recently I started a React project with class component…

> I am not so up to date with frontend dev but what's with the hate towards React these days?

HN is rarely the place to read constructive comments about JavaScript and frontend development.

Personally I've been developing web apps for 10 years (with technologies such as Spring, ASP.NET, CakePHP, Symfony, Django, jQuery, Backbone.js, Angular 1) and I quite enjoy React. I think it makes my job easier and I feel productive with it.

Also, TypeScript is awesome.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#96

Post by capableweb »

TomMarius wrote: post #59
capableweb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to confuse "normal" with "required". dvt (correctly) states that "it's normal now to have like 3-4 compilation/transpilation" which is indeed true for most React codebases (open source and not) I've came across. In fact, I don't think I've come across a single React application that is seriously built without using JSX and without a bundler (like including react.js in the beginning of HTML). While not requir…

But what's so hard/bad? Literally zero config and two commands: npm install -g parcel-bundler parcel ./index.html

Those two commands are not just "zero config and two commands", think about the entire stack you're pulling down behind the scenes. Sure, it's easy when you want to render "hello world" but there is so much context and abstraction happening here, that is hidden. Then we haven't even started thinking about HOCs, SSR and lifecycle hooks, none of them addressed by your terminal snippet.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#97

Post by osdiab »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #94
osdiab wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think HTML is for? If you want the hypermedia-concept of mostly static documents with links to each other, feel free to turn off Javascript or not use React. If you’re using the web as an application delivery platform that works cross platform without installs and instant updates, then HTML is the base of your UI framework, and as such it helps to have predictability that frameworks like React offer. Re s…

Let’s put it straight: HTML is a Hypertext Markup Language by definition, it’s not an application UI markup language. We are living in a very confused world where inappropriate standard is used just because nothing better got sufficiently big market share. ES, TS, CSS, all the libraries and frameworks in the ecosystem are all just attempts to make the whale fly. For last 20 years we should have been focusing on build…

On that I agree, I do wish there was a better cross-platform application UI platform. But it doesn’t exist, so as such beggars can’t be choosers.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#98

Post by efdee »

kuschku wrote: post #71
efdee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classes in React are confusing because they aren't actually classes, just something shoehorned into classes. For example you wouldn't write your initialization code in the constructor, you would do it in componentDidMount. Classes in React generate false expectations.

Yeah but how is that different from any other UI framework? onCreate/onStart/onResume and onComponentDidMount, onPause/onStop/onDestroy and onComponentWillUnmount are basically the same. Be it Android, Swing, or Qt, everywhere it's the same pattern. React is the first framework which actually feels like UI development on the web, not anymore like JS spaghetti. In fact, having internal state, externally given props, e…

I think lifecycle methods in general, no matter what the framework is, are a suboptimal way of doing things. React works quite differently and shoehorning it into a lifecycle thing was holding it back, or at least that's how I feel. YMMV.

At least it looks like we agree that React is a decent framework :-)

That said, for us devs who do both native and JS code, the condescending part is quite hilarious as well ;-)

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#99

Post by arvinsim »

dvt wrote: post #44
osdiab wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, sometime…

It doesn't take much imagination to see that in a deep component hierarchy, drilling down states as props is a maintainability nightmare.

Re: What I wish I knew about React

#100

Post by efdee »

mjfisher wrote: post #76
efdee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher order components haven't really been a thing since hooks were introduced though.

True, but it's important to remember hooks were only released about a year ago - many large projects in existence before then will either not have migrated or be in a state of partial migration. I'm glad they're putting the effort into making the API simpler and easier to use to address some of those concerns, but React itself has been around for seven years now - the vast majority of existing developments will have…

I very much agree. It just feels weird to complain about a problem that's been solved a year and a half ago.
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