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The rise of React

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Re: The rise of React

#51

Post by brandonmenc »

baron816 wrote: post #40
toshk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside to that is that I've seen a lot of old school frontenders who 5-7 years ago were able to just dus html/css and sass haven't been able to keep up, it just got too complex. In that regard the old situation had better seperation of concerns.

That's the luddite take. You probably shouldn't take up a career in technology if you're not willing to continually learn new things to keep up with advancements.

React may be an improvement on what came before, but it's still too complex for "draw a UI on the most-widely used platform."

It's definitely not helping to democratize programming the way that the personal computer did when it simplified the world of computers down to a BASIC interpreter that a child could understand.

The "advancements" are necessary, but let's be honest - they are far from ideal, overcomplicated messes that exist solely to paper over the fact that the main software delivery platform is still just a hacked-up document viewer. They make professional programmers' lives easier, but the act of programming becomes generally less accessible with each iteration.

Re: The rise of React

#52

Post by pmlnr »

> What differentiates websites from one another today isn’t their underlying architecture but their content, design, and editorial.

This is bad, this will kill the quirky, fun internet. Monoculture is not good.

Re: The rise of React

#53

Post by ng12 »

ahupp wrote: post #43
ng12 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have done a lot of React in the last 6 years and have never been frustrated with their decisions, which is very rare. Same, but this is also why I feel burnt by create-react-app. There's so many important features the team has simply decided it won't support. One of the biggest issues with the React ecosystem is that there's nothing in between training wheels (CRA) and a motorcycle (rolling your own config). Mayb…

Check out craco, for overriding specific bits of config without ejecting: https://github.com/gsoft-inc/craco

I've been using craco. I really commend the creators but it's a project that shouldn't exist. I shouldn't have to hack the officially supported solution to do simple things like provide my SSL cert to Webpack or tweak some Babel config.

Re: The rise of React

#54

Post by kgin »

andrekandre wrote: post #50
kgin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that HTML was meant to be a pure data format, styled by CSS classes that also were somehow part of that pure data format was always silly, but it became much more silly once REST apis became popular.

maybe its "ivory-tower thinking" in the end... that idea alwasy appealed to me to he honest... i guess the thing is its only one small facet of web development, not the whole thing

Same here, I spent so much time making semantic html that felt great but in the end was never consumed semantically by anyone or anything.

Re: The rise of React

#55

Post by ThePadawan »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #31
ng12 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have done a lot of React in the last 6 years and have never been frustrated with their decisions, which is very rare. Same, but this is also why I feel burnt by create-react-app. There's so many important features the team has simply decided it won't support. One of the biggest issues with the React ecosystem is that there's nothing in between training wheels (CRA) and a motorcycle (rolling your own config). Mayb…

I totally agree. If you need access to one config variable CRA doesn't support out of the box, your only option is to eject. I really wish there were the option of just providing an "overlay" file that only had your changes from the CRA defaults, rather than being forced to eject the whole config.

I can only second what ht85 said in a sibling comment.

I have the same complaint, but this is definitely possible using e.g. react-app-rewired.

Adding custom webpack loader rules is as simple as replacing the calls to react-scripts with calls to react-app-rewired and adding a .js file with your customizations.

Re: The rise of React

#56

Post by ng12 »

k__ wrote: post #41
ng12 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have done a lot of React in the last 6 years and have never been frustrated with their decisions, which is very rare. Same, but this is also why I feel burnt by create-react-app. There's so many important features the team has simply decided it won't support. One of the biggest issues with the React ecosystem is that there's nothing in between training wheels (CRA) and a motorcycle (rolling your own config). Mayb…

"there's nothing in between training wheels (CRA) and a motorcycle" AFAIK the "betweens" are Next.js, Blitz.js, Gatsby, Remix, Expo, etc.

I like Next.js quite a bit but I don't need SSR. To expand upon my use case a bit: I need a way to create dozens of small SPAs in an enterprise environment maintained by people who are not front-end experts. CRA fits the bill almost perfectly except it makes certain Webpack/Babel configs unavailable that make my life very difficult. The token response from the CRA team tends to be: we don't think you need this, fork or eject.

Eventually I'll end up maintaining a company fork. It's more work for me but that's life. It's really just the dogmatic attitude of the CRA team that irks me.

Re: The rise of React

#57

Post by marvindanig »

Agreed!

The intent of React is to drive new developers away from the building blocks of the web. And it has definitely succeeded at that. The way its ecosystem has grown all over the place, I find very passionate developers that swear by it.

But you never know, every technology at some point of time becomes a luddite’s take and then it’d become hard to even consider React. Someday may be near as well, given that it’s already more than 10 years old now… but then that would also be a good day for open web standards and simplicity. ;-)

Re: The rise of React

#58

Post by Ididntdothis »

satya71 wrote: post #8

The only reason I choose React today is the immense ecosystem around it. With every other framework, even though the core framework is capable enough, it feels like I have to reinvent wheels, axles, and more.

Isn't that a failure of the framework developers that not more stuff is in reusable libraries? When I did some Angular I thought that at 70% of the framework should be in libraries that are independent of the framework and reusable.

Re: The rise of React

#59

Post by jcadam »

satya71 wrote: post #8

The only reason I choose React today is the immense ecosystem around it. With every other framework, even though the core framework is capable enough, it feels like I have to reinvent wheels, axles, and more.

Yea, I'm a big fan of mithril.js, but I've moved over to React as my preferred framework primarily for this reason. The fact that the Clojurescript community has embraced it via reagent is a big factor as well.

Re: The rise of React

#60

Post by smnplk »

AbenezerMamo wrote: post #9
ht85 wrote: post #2

Props to the people who have been managing the project. I have done a lot of React in the last 6 years and have never been frustrated with their decisions, which is very rare. I think beyond the technical aspects, the way React evolved over time was really on point. The roadmap has always been very well designed and the literature around new features and deprecated ones top notch. The way React is used has changed co…

Is “props” a pun? If it is...I appreciate it * snap

This comment rendered me speechless.
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