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

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

#21

Post by ravenstine »

qprofyeh wrote: post #4

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…

What React does is no longer novel. People have both cloned React and have made other libraries/frameworks that accomplish the same thing differently or even faster in some cases.

Frontend craft has also become too complex in general. We really need to step back and decide whether all this fucking shit around SPA, SSR, route splitting, transpiling, everything-as-a-type, "me too" features between frameworks, overemphasis on trendy designs, package managers that wrap around other package managers, REST or GraphQL or RPC, etc. etc. etc. Much of which serves mostly to create corporate careers for developers more than to actually serve users.

React takes us forward in the sense that most of us don't want to go back to direct DOM manipulation or jQuery, and it's simple enough that it doesn't come with the same baggage as Vue, Angular, Ember, and so on. Even if React itself were to fade, the institution that is React I think will continue on for the foreseeable future.

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

#22

Post by fabian2k »

lghh wrote: post #14
fabian2k wrote: post #5

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 (especial…

While I agree that the intent of Context isn't state management, but its functionality in practice is nearly identical to state management. I know and agree this has been discussed to death, so please be patient while I beat this long-dead horse. In the beta React docs, Context is described as: "Context lets the parent component make some information available to any component in the tree below it—no matter how deep—…

Context is useful for certain cases, but plain old useState/useReducers are the workhorses. I think the beta docs are pretty good about explaining the tradeoffs (https://beta.reactjs.org/learn/passing-data-deeply-with-cont...).

To me one of the biggest issue is that almost everyone is deeply afraid of prop drilling. Passing props around and having some local state works very well for large parts of many applications. With hooks we don't have deeply nested Higher-Order components anymore, if you pay a bit of attention you can have reasonably shallow component hierarchies and props work very nicely then.

Server-side state is a special case, I find that much easier to handle with something like React Query. But once that is done I don't see much need for any external state management library like Redux, useState/useReducer works pretty well.

And yes, sometimes Context is useful for state that doesn't change much. But those are the cases where the drawbacks don't matter. But that is a special case, not necessary for the vast majority of state.

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

#23

Post by nightpool »

valyagolev wrote: post #12

Useless rerenders are really hard to avoid in the latest react, mostly because they changed the rerendering logic of useTransition, breaking some of the state abstractions built on top of it. Had to downgrade and started to think about using class-based components again. Hooks are very beautiful but too weird, weak and leaky as an abstraction, unfortunately

You mean they changed the edge-case performance characteristics of an experimental alpha API? It feels hard to get up-in-arms about that.

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

#24

Post by nightpool »

nsonha wrote: post #9
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.

Yeah, I agree that react-hook-forms feels much more natural and straightforward to use compared to Formik. It's just a shame it's so poorly documented.

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

#25

Post by scrozier »

fabian2k wrote: post #5

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 (especial…

This conflation of Redux and Context as state management is devilishly persistent. As I see it, Redux is [state management] + [prop passing], and Context is [prop passing]. There is no [state management] "feature" of Context. You still have to use (something like) useState for [state management] with Context. As long as people try to compare them as equivalent feature sets, the confusion will continue.

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

#27

Post by recursivedoubts »

nsonha wrote: post #7
recursivedoubts wrote: post #2

> What's next for us? You tell me. I'm gonna say something crazy here, but hang with me: hypermedia .

didn't it fail like 20 years ago, why do you think it'll succeed now?

unfortunately HTML didn't make any significant progress as a hypermedia for a decade and a half, but some folks (myself included) are trying to fix that (unpoly, htmx, hotwire, etc.)

an enhanced hypermedia model offers a lot more interactivity often at a fraction of the complexity, and w/ the benefits of the REST-ful architecture (flexibility, etc.)

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

#28

Post by mind-blight »

knoebber wrote: post #19

I spent about 2 years at my last job building a greenfield react app mostly by myself (around 10k sloc). I enjoyed it for the most part. But I did run into all the issues raised here, they are valid. I think the worst issue with React is the dependency arrays that get sprinkled around everywhere - in my opinion the framework is unusable without a 3rd party linting tool that points out when your dependency array is mi…

I think a lot of the problems the author highlighted become more apparent as the number of devs in the codebase goes up.

If one member doesn't understand all of the nuances of useEffect or paint useCallback, they can write a component or custom hook that another team uses and gets subtle bugs from.

For example, I need to look inside of a hook to see whether the callback it provided was wrapped in useCallback. That means I can't truly rely on the abstraction since I need to learn it's internals.

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

#29

Post by rafale »

I prefer Angular. I never could accept writing css/html in my javascript. To be fair, my background is from XAML, so declaring the state separately and simply binding to it in my html template felt natural. The whole functional approach in React is overkill imo. It's okay if the state mutates in 90% of scenarios. Where there is really benefit from immutable states, I can enforce that on my own.

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

#30

Post by root_axis »

kansface wrote: post #17
throwaway284534 wrote: post #10

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…

That’s the thing though - hooks aren’t JS. They don’t allow for control flow. Hooks are a language that superficially looks like JS. I’m with you on not inventing new languages, and I wish that React didn’t step so far off that path itself…

Hooks are not a "language", they're just react API calls.
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