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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

#91

Post by plugin-baby »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #56
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.

Formik hasn’t been updated in years, is riddled with bugs and performance issues, and very likely will never be updated again. Not what I’d want in a JS library.

What are the bugs and performance issues? I’ve been using it for years without problems.

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

#93

Post by wpietri »

jwlake wrote: post #82
nonethewiser wrote: post #46

I must be the only person in the world who likes class components in React. Sure, it's often overkill and a functional component does the same thing with less code. Use a functional component in these cases. But if you're doing something more complicated then stop treating class components like the fucking devil. They have their place.

I use functional components only for things without state. If anything has state I use class components because otherwise you go mad. ;)

Could you say more about this? I'm not a React user, but to me one of the OO fundamentals is "object = behavior + state". What you're saying sounds so obviously correct to me that I guess there's something pretty weird going on in React-land?

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

#94

Post by vore »

asdajksah2123 wrote: post #75

I really hope React doesn't handle dependencies automatically. There have been many frameworks that have done that in the past. It does not end well with an application of any decent size. A pre-compile step that statically adds dependencies to your code might be a reasonable compromise, but those dependencies do need to be explicit. The rest of the stuff makes a lot of sense though.

Why not? Having to manually manage the dependency array is tedious: in fact, not specifying a required dependency is a logic error anyway, so having the compiler do it is basically preferred in all cases.

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

#95

Post by markandrewj »

The thing that has kept me tied to React is the support for native mobile and desktop development. Expo has been a really nice environment for mobile development compared to some other things I have used in the past. EAS is also pretty handy. It looks like Svelte has improved in this area, but my past experiences with NativeScript were not very inspiring. Is anyone using Svelte for production mobile or desktop development?

What are peoples thoughts on Svelte vs Solid? I know Lit/native web components are out there as an option as well. I have past experiences with it when it was Polymer.

If anyone is looking for something very lightweight they may want to consider Alpine as well.

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

#96

Post by caycep »

When ppl whine about Swift UI, this sort of post kinda seems to highlight that growing pains issues are perhaps similar across the board.

The difference is that Microsoft languages may have better ppl working on developer documentation, who knows...

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

#97

Post by BilalBudhani »

nonethewiser wrote: post #46

I must be the only person in the world who likes class components in React. Sure, it's often overkill and a functional component does the same thing with less code. Use a functional component in these cases. But if you're doing something more complicated then stop treating class components like the fucking devil. They have their place.

I ditched React soon after they released hooks, mainly because I couldn't relate to the tradeoff React roadmap was taking from there. They went in a different direction from that point onwards, it seem like whatever code you write will become obsolete with the new set of best practices in the next release cycle.

More importantly, I realized React is trying to tame Facebook level of problems and hence their design decision steams from those data points. I develop small/medium type of frontend apps which doesn't need to apply solutions developed for such a scale.

These days I'm using Hotwire[1] (Turbo + Stimulus) with fair amount of vanilla javascript libraries in my apps. Occasionally, when I need to develop a reactive piece of UI I reach out for Svelte[2]

I'm quite happy after making the move. My apps complexity has reduced drastically and there is huge boost in my overall productivity.

[1] https://hotwired.dev

[2] https://svelte.dev

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

#98

Post by shaunxcode »

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…

Yes! CLJS + Reagent (and thus react).

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

#99

Post by pier25 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #46

I must be the only person in the world who likes class components in React. Sure, it's often overkill and a functional component does the same thing with less code. Use a functional component in these cases. But if you're doing something more complicated then stop treating class components like the fucking devil. They have their place.

I totally agree. I actually stopped using React around the time hooks were announced. In retrospect it's still not clear if hooks were even a good idea.

Changing the core methodology of a project used by millions of developers at the time was extremely irresponsible. They basically made obsolete all React educational resources overnight. I'm sure people making money by producing React educational content were very happy about that though.

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

#100

Post by bornfreddy »

phailhaus wrote: post #67
bornfreddy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're not the only one. Apart from useState, which is elegant, I hate others with passion. How can a replacement for lifecycle methods be called useEffect? Seriously? Great article, couldn't agree more with them.

> How can a replacement for lifecycle methods be called useEffect? Seriously? Yes, seriously. Have you used it for more complex components? You can split your effects across multiple useEffects, and have a guarantee that they run completely independently of each other (especially since you know what their dependencies are). Compare that to lifecycle methods: you only have one per component. All your effects concerned…

Fair enough. Though, the first question is - why does the component do so many things? Do they all need to be in a single component or can you break them apart?

For the cases when this is not possible, I agree, useEffect works better than classes lifecycle methods. But do you really want a system which caters to a small percent of use-cases at the expense of readability in others? And the improvement, to my eyes, is not that big anyway.

The hooks are my main gripe with React, but as the OP, I don't see a better alternative either - at least not one that would be worth a rewrite.

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