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Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

jackfranklin.co.uk

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Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#131

Post by ludamad »

panny wrote: post #111
louthy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a huge amount of man-hours poured into making these frameworks work correctly under any condition. The path is littered with the ghosts of frameworks past. Don't let the current efforts or trends convince you that we're done with this process. React will be a ghost one day.

I can advertise for a "React developer" and find people familiar with react rendering. I will never be able to do that with in-house render solution. This will apply to whatever replaces react as well. Unless I'm selling a render solution, I don't want to be maintaining a render solution. Maintaining glue code might suck, but writing everything from scratch limits the scale of the work that a person can accomplish. I…

I think that's the biggest thing to me. It's easy to say 'we can do just fine without $BAG_OF_TOOLS, there's no real need for it, it's simpler and faster and we get off the ground with it', but then once you have enough people that a bag of tools is needed, you create an in-house bag and soon you have a 'simple' system for managing state that is nevertheless much less exciting to the new cohort of $BAG_OF_TOOLS bootcamp graduates, etc. And people pointing to the framework graveyard ignore that you need to hire people now, not 10 years from now. If 10 years from now React is as obscure as an in-house framework, meh?

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#132

Post by slkdk32 »

ldiracdelta wrote: post #113
MonaroVXR wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never thought about that, where do you get this from? But it kinda rings true for me in life.

I heard it from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. In addition to writing that comic he is a very interesting thinker. He is also a trained hypnotist.

No post body was provided.

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#133

Post by dvt »

ng12 wrote: post #11

> But the web platform isn't perfect, and I suspect most React developers have come across a situation where you’d love to be able to just tweak how your component is being rendered. Honestly, I haven't. The only potential caveat I can think of is when you have some non-reactive legacy code you want to embed inside a React component... but even then React's escape hatches are more than sufficient. If you're really wo…

This has got to be gaslighting at the highest level: oh you're doing something wrong because that's not how you're supposed to do it in React. Not since Java's Spring have I encountered such weird zealotry for a relatively mediocre (but widely popular) framework.

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#134

Post by orangepurple »

enlyth wrote: post #72
louthy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a huge amount of man-hours poured into making these frameworks work correctly under any condition. The path is littered with the ghosts of frameworks past. Don't let the current efforts or trends convince you that we're done with this process. React will be a ghost one day.

That's like saying I should use a steam engine today because the electric motor will be superseded someday.

The steam engines will continue to run on coal after the natural gas to the power plant is shut off and the power stops working for the electric trains

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#135

Post by Gigachad »

louthy wrote: post #69
_pdp_ wrote: post #8

If all you need is a couple of basic forms and some basic interaction, you can do it all with vanilla JS but let's not kid ourselves. This will not allow you to build very rich apps without implementing a significant chunk of the frameworks you dislike so much. In fact, I would even say that if this is not a core part of your product, you are simply wasting time and resources. There is a huge amount of man-hours pour…

> There is a huge amount of man-hours poured into making these frameworks work correctly under any condition. The path is littered with the ghosts of frameworks past. Don't let the current efforts or trends convince you that we're done with this process. React will be a ghost one day.

The longer something has existed on top, the longer it will continue to. React still hasn't peaked yet. Its tail to obsolescence will outlast anything you build in it today.

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#136

Post by bfz »

Article makes a variety of already well understood points, but only briefly touches on the most interesting one (from my perspective): durability.

If the thing you're integrating is an evolving, improving moving target, and it's coming out of a team of only a handful of people, double any visible costs associated with your application for the sucker who must build it in 2 years time to add some new feature. It is possible to build a strong and easy to communicate case for avoiding frameworks using long term maintenance costs as the basis.

jQuery was actually pretty good at this, it only had one big flag day that I can remember. In that sense, jQuery was much closer to what you get for free working directly against the platform interfaces. Deprecation cycles are much, much longer, and burden of proof much higher for new features in the browser than pretty much any third party framework.

Somewhere here on the thread there was slander directed at Closure Library / Compiler. In this context, that is so totally tone-deaf, Closure Compiler/Library projects from 2010 still build with little to no changes today (based on local experience). I can't say the same for any alternative I have used in the past decade.

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#137

Post by gitgud »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #116
5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's there to optimize? If you don't use state, it doesn't rerender. If you click a button to add another element for example, it does exactly that. If you have a reactive variable in your HTML and update it it rerenders that part only. What's there to optimize further?

Depending on the complexity of your computations and state, what you just described can basically become unusable. For example, an app I work on implements a spec which: - Models state as an arbitrary DAG - With arbitrarily deep dependency chains - Which may trigger dependent nodes based on only subsets of their state - Based on computations of arbitrary XPath expressions, sometimes containing non-native extensions;…

> Being able to batch state -> render updates based on priority even better still.

Mobx [1] is pretty good for this, it batches updates that happen, making rendering more efficient.

Also regarding rendering, react will update a component it it's state changes. It might update its children components, but if you pass them in as props, they won't be updated, as they're rendered in the parent component's context.

This allows you to create complex applications with thousands of interactive components, and have quite good performance, as minimal rendering is performed.

[1] https://mobx.js.org/react-integration.html

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#138

Post by interlocutor »

dragonwriter wrote: post #128
interlocutor wrote: post #26

React works well for simple, non-interactive components. Complex, interactive components are going to have state. Stateful components don't work so well in React. If you want to update props in a stateful component, the recommendation is to replace the component entirely by changing its key. At the point all of the benefits of React (preservation of selection, caret position, scroll position etc.) vanish. You might a…

> Stateful components don't work so well in React. They work fine, though managing state outside of components via a state management library is common. > If you want to update props in a stateful component, the recommendation is to replace the component entirely by changing its key. Where do you find this recommendation? I’ve never seen anything like it, and keys are usually only used for repeating sets of elements,…

> Where do you find this recommendation?

https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/06/07/you-probably-dont-need-d...

> keys are usually only used for repeating sets of elements

Not true at all!

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#139

Post by interlocutor »

kikki wrote: post #42
interlocutor wrote: post #26

React works well for simple, non-interactive components. Complex, interactive components are going to have state. Stateful components don't work so well in React. If you want to update props in a stateful component, the recommendation is to replace the component entirely by changing its key. At the point all of the benefits of React (preservation of selection, caret position, scroll position etc.) vanish. You might a…

This is either a fundamental misunderstanding of React, or you're actually talking about a different library. > React works well for simple, non-interactive components. Complex, interactive components are going to have state. Stateful components don't work so well in React React components are designed with state in mind. When state changes, components passed that state in the form of props are re-rendered. Don't tak…

> When state changes, components passed that state in the form of props are re-rendered.

https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/06/07/you-probably-dont-need-d...

> I have never heard these spouted as the benefits of React.

You will find this if you read enough of React developers' blogs. JavaScript and DOM these days are fast enough that most pages can completely re-render the page and replace the whole DOM in one shot and you won't be able to tell the difference. The downside of doing that is that you lose focus, selection, scroll position, etc. So preserving those things is the benefit of React.

Re: Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform

#140

Post by frosted-flakes »

MonaroVXR wrote: post #114
v0idzer0 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it feels that way because it’s a bit of a paradigm shift in terms of the way we think about building user interfaces, but the reality is its just javascript running in a browser. I’ve been writing react over 10 years and used to devtools just a handful of times. They’re by no means necessary. I used to use an extension for jQuery to quickly find css selectors. Nobody was saying we weren’t using the platform t…

> "...and used to devtools just a handful of times." How do you debug?

React dev tools, specifically. Of course I (and GP, assumedly) uses the browser dev tools. I don't find the React dev tools very useful.
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