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The rise of React

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Re: The rise of React

#121
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clojurescript with reagent and re-frame (or keechma, hoplon and others) outlasted two generations of Javascript technical churn. Nothing comes close.

Not really. Remember when people used Om for React bindings in Clojurescript? Clojurescript changes too. React has been around the whole time though. Also, along the topic in this thread, I've never met someone who used Clojure/script. It's why I ended up just using Node/Javascript in the end. It gets lonely in the Clojure cave.

Om was the first attempt by David Nolen, to see if it could be done. There were probably some ideas in Om that helped create Reagent and Fulcro.I haven't used it myself, but I heard it influenced libraries that came after. It's also not fair to compare longevity of a binding library that needs to be kept up to date to the lib it binds to, but Reagent has been around for 7 years, with all the changes happening in React itself. Sure there are changes in Clojurescript ecosystem, but certainly not as frequent and tiresome as in Javascript land.

I am sure you could find someone doing Clojure stuff if you searched for Clojure on meetup.com

Re: The rise of React

#122

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.

Is it really that maddening? This response feels much too political. There are things worth getting mad about, and then there are JavaScript frameworks.

Also, why does everything have to be so radicalized? "Journalistic malpractice"? It's hard to have earnest discourse in 2020 for this reason. People often push everything to the extreme immediately.

Re: The rise of React

#123

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.

Vue has also JSX as optional for the template system. you can see react as a subset of Vue.

Re: The rise of React

#124

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 wh…

> One way data flow combined with automatic updating and rendering React did not bring that. Flux , released a few months later, brought the unidirectional data-flow to it; we were already building similar architectures using event buses, though with looser abstractions. The 'automatic rendering' is a bit deceptive. Unless you manually optimize it, React will simply re-render everything all the time which is the same…

Did Flux really bring one way data flow? Because that's a pretty essential part of React. Even if React adopted it later, it's a core part of React's appeal.

Do you legitimately see no difference in websites from 2012 and 2020? I'm honestly baffled if that's true. Payments are a massive difference that I've noticed. Every decent ecommerce site these days uses quite a lot of slick tricks to make the purchase flow really easy. Whether it's autocomplete based on Google Maps address data or being able to do everything without any obvious page refreshes, payments are significantly slicker. React definitely facilitates this.

> There is no 'round trip' for server render

Uhh there is a round trip. You click on a link, the new page does a request, loads new HTML, new CSS and paints the new page. Sure, an SPA takes longer to load up front, but you can now ensure that everything past that point is seamless. On a site like Facebook where the initial load won't kill conversions (because people are already addicted), you can take a 500ms hit so that stuff like infinite scroll and seamless notifications keep people on the site.

Re: The rise of React

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

I've had the opposite experience regarding RxJava. I really think "reactive" is an anti-pattern. Its made my companies code base much harder to reason about.

Re: The rise of React

#127
post #52

> 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.

I don't get it unless you interpreted that statement inversely. It's the content, not the underlying architecture of a website, that makes in quirky and fun.

Not sure if this is what GP meant, but I guess it can be understood as "since what matters is the content, just use React".

Re: The rise of React

#128
React made a lot of sense to escape Angular, Ember, Backbone and jQuery in 2013-2014, but then it took 4-5 years to become wildly popular [1]. I've never understood its popularity despite the fact that during those years there were already better options out there by any metric you can think of (except popularity and hype).

- Inferno and Preact: similar API but so much faster and smaller.

- Mithril: vdom based with components, faster than React and includes http client + router in 10kB gzipped.

- Vue: faster and smaller and has official batteries (unlike react-router which is a third party)

Etc.

[1] https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=react&from=2013-05-...

Re: The rise of React

#129

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.

(Sophie Alpert here.) What I meant is it’s not clear the next thing that will _replace_ React.

Certainly there are plenty of great alternatives, each with their own pros and cons – but at this point, none clearly poised to “take over”.

Re: The rise of React

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that maddening? This response feels much too political. There are things worth getting mad about, and then there are JavaScript frameworks.

Also, why does everything have to be so radicalized? "Journalistic malpractice"? It's hard to have earnest discourse in 2020 for this reason. People often push everything to the extreme immediately.

Pushing debate to extremes is as old as humanity. I don't see any evidence to suggest that it's gotten worse recently (certain countries recent political increase in extremism notwithstanding).
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