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React I love you, but you're bringing me down

marmelab.com

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Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#4

Post by qprofyeh »

One could argue that it's not that React can't handle increasingly complex situations for you and that's why you spend more time on them, but that frontend as a craft has evolved due to React having solved the easy parts and has raised the bar, and therefore these complex situations belong to the next breeding site wherein the community is arguing about new solutions all the time, at the current time. It's healthy to retrospect how we got to this breeding site, yet there's always a certain doubt or even bias that what brought us here today is not what takes us forward tomorrow. It's like the reverse of Shiny Object Syndrome.

In time, I believe React can still take us forward.

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#5

Post by fabian2k »

The part about Redux and Context seems to be a complete misinterpretation of what Context is meant for. It was never meant to replace Redux, and as far as I know nobody from the React team has ever claimed something like that. State management in React is a topic discussed to death, there are plenty of options if you have specific tastes or requirements but plain old React state works perfectly fine as well (especially when coupled to server-side state libraries like React Query). But Context is not about state management, it does not seem useful to complain that it doesn't do a job well it was never meant to do.

The part about the Inspector component and the rules of hooks I don't understand. I would have put the visibility state outside the Inspector component, and then there is no need for any conditional calling of hooks.

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#6

Post by geewee »

Can definitely agree with his pain point about forms. I've been through most of the libraries, and the one I liked the most was Formik, because it felt like I could actually get something done. react-hook-forms is beautiful when it works, but the documentation is byzanthine - even when I know exactly what I'm looking for (and I've seen the page before), I often can't find it.

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#9

Post by nsonha »

geewee wrote: post #6

Can definitely agree with his pain point about forms. I've been through most of the libraries, and the one I liked the most was Formik, because it felt like I could actually get something done. react-hook-forms is beautiful when it works, but the documentation is byzanthine - even when I know exactly what I'm looking for (and I've seen the page before), I often can't find it.

this is an unpopular opinion, most people including myself would say the opposite. react-hook-forms seems pretty natural and closer to html form & plain javascript, while Formik is (was?) this bizzare thing that forces jsx and controlled inputs upon us devs.

Re: React I love you, but you're bringing me down

#10

Post by throwaway284534 »

As a developer who’s been working with React since the beta, I can confidently say that the author is speaking the truth. Especially so near the end of the article where they can’t seem to quit React.

For all the annoyances of Hooks, they really are a godsend when it comes to composing state. And refs do indeed suck, but they sucked even more with class based components. I can’t tell you how many times I was able to solve a complex DOM state issue with custom hooks wrapped around refs.

Newer tools like Svelte and Solid do look promising as far as removing boilerplate, but they personally feel a step too far off the path of “it’s just JavaScript.”

Has anyone else here successfully left for greener JS pastures?

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