The rise of React • Hacker News Board

Re: The rise of React

#91

Post by Ozzie_osman » Sun, May 31, 2020, 9:19 PM UTC

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #83

As someone who has been in the industry for a dozen years, and been an engineer or managed engineers at companies of different sizes, I love React. Some benefits: 1- It has bridged a previously large gap between FE code and BE code, and hence, made it a lot easier for engineers who aren't FE-specialists to build frontend code. I've found that backend engineers are a lot more willing and able to write React code, sinc…

I'd also add that if you don't like React, but haven't tried it in a few years, you should give it another shot. It's still not perfect, but recent additions like hooks have been able to cut out a lot of the pain points it used to have. Even just using React with Typescript makes it easier and more robust (vs the old PropType syntax.. And yes I know you can use both but for 90% of use cases you don't need to).

Re: The rise of React

#92

Post by talkinghead » Sun, May 31, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

increment looks super great just picked up a couple of copies of the mag thanks for sharing

Re: The rise of React

#93

Post by mattlondon » Sun, May 31, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

ridicter wrote: post #32

whycombagator wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With every other framework, even though the core framework is capable enough, it feels like I have to reinvent wheels, axles, and more. Curious, does that apply to Angular/Ember?

My experience with react with different: you have to spend a large amount of time upfront in order to get the basic features of a single page app. You burn a lot of mental energy figuring out which forms library, router library, etc to use. When it's time to upgrade, you have no guarantees that your libraries will continue to play together nicely. And quality and standards between libraries can vary dramatically. I p…

Same experience here with Angular - I have heard it described as "batteries included". It has basically everything you need to do 99% of all projects right out of the box (notable missing thing is something cohesive to properly manage application state in a nice way).

Takes a bit of effort to learn, but once you are up and running with Angular things are pretty fast to put together.

Re: The rise of React

#94

Post by couchcombinator » Sun, May 31, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

jaredcwhite wrote: post #87

This article was great…up until the very end when it failed to mention any alternatives to React that already exist . "Alpert, who helped chart React’s rise, doesn’t see an alternative emerging anytime soon." This is completely ridiculous. Vue, Svelte, LitElement / Web Components, to name but a few. Maddening to see this level of journalistic malpractice.

There are alternatives to React indeed, but those you mentioned are conceptually very different.

Re: The rise of React

#95

Post by mattlondon » Sun, May 31, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #42

ridicter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with react with different: you have to spend a large amount of time upfront in order to get the basic features of a single page app. You burn a lot of mental energy figuring out which forms library, router library, etc to use. When it's time to upgrade, you have no guarantees that your libraries will continue to play together nicely. And quality and standards between libraries can vary dramatically. I p…

I dont know how much has changed in the two years since I last touched it, but Angular's blessed packages and ecosystem were more of a time sink than anything else- the flex layout package in particular was substantially buggier than simply using postcss with what was at the time css-next (I think it is preset-env now?) Additionally, baking in rx-js felt like a serious mistake- not only was there the roller coaster r…

Yeah when I first started learning Angular I had similar thoughts "Why did they make this so hard?!?!?!" regarding RxJS. To be fair regarding Typescript & ES2015, you'd get that with React too (since in my mind you;d be insane to start something new in raw Javascript these days when Typescript has made our lives so much so much so much better).

Now though I find RxJS to be a really elegant mental model for dealing with asynchronous stuff. I wish there was more Reactive/Rx* stuff around in the things I work with. Its really nice.

Re: The rise of React

#96

Post by bluedevil2k » Sun, May 31, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

jaredcwhite wrote: post #87

This article was great…up until the very end when it failed to mention any alternatives to React that already exist . "Alpert, who helped chart React’s rise, doesn’t see an alternative emerging anytime soon." This is completely ridiculous. Vue, Svelte, LitElement / Web Components, to name but a few. Maddening to see this level of journalistic malpractice.

"journalistic malpractice" - he's merely passing on the sentiment of the main subject of the piece.

Re: The rise of React

#97

Post by manigandham » Sun, May 31, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

bsaul wrote: post #77

sidenote : i find it funny nobody in the comments mentions vue.js. i find mentions of ember and angular, but i had the impression vue was the one that got all the love recently. Has something bad happened to this framework ?

No, might just be the timing of this submission. Vue is doing great and is about to release version 3 which will be another big leap forward.

Re: The rise of React

#98

Post by bluedevil2k » Sun, May 31, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

cateye wrote: post #69

Wild conspiracy theory: Facebook, Dropbox, Netflix, Reddit made React popular so that web developers can't develop a competing service because of the complexity that it introduces.

Or maybe there's genuinely good people working at Facebook who want to help others and help them succeed at their job.

Re: The rise of React

#99

Post by Marazan » Sun, May 31, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

I was a Flex developer.

No JS framework felt anywhere close to the ease and power of Flex until I saw React.

React is Flex done right. React is Flex but armed with the knowledge that two way data binding is the fucking devil.

Re: The rise of React

#100

Post by _hardwaregeek » Sun, May 31, 2020, 9:49 PM UTC

Meh, React is great for more reasons than modularity. One way data flow combined with automatic updating and rendering is really really nice. I just wrote a simple UI for a terminal and having to manually call a function to paint to the screen felt rather...quaint. We've had modular templates for years. It's only recently that we've had the ability to think of UI elements as functions that automatically get called when their arguments update.

This article also doesn't delve into why Facebook supports React so much. Or why Twitter, Reddit and the rest are switching to React. The answer being that React lets developers make really smooth, really addictive websites. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some studies showing that any flash of unstyled content, i.e. a server render round trip, lowers conversions by x%. Therefore having a client side app is imperative if you care about having your users on your site. Multiply it by Facebook's revenue and paying the few million to fund a team of developers is a really good deal.