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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

#111

Post by rileyphone »

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 think the problem is ES6 classes just aren't very flexible or expressive, compared to systems like Ruby, Smalltalk, or CLOS. For a lot of programmers, half-assed classes are worse than no classes, even when they can help with organizing state and behavior.

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

#112

Post by phailhaus »

bornfreddy wrote: post #100
phailhaus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's not a matter of doing too many things. Lifecycle methods exist to be used, and the moment you have any behavior that requires multiple lifecycle hooks, you will run into these issues. So I'd say it's not a small-percentage of use-cases at all, and you'll often see the benefits of hooks immediately.

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

#113

Post by ncann »

reactspa wrote: post #104
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.

Is it possible to continue coding in some early version of React that only had class components? Has anyone branched that into its own thing yet?

Class component is still fully working as of latest React and won't be going away (at least according to the React docs). The main issue is when you work on a codebase that's full of function components and hooks it's hard to mix in class components.

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

#114

Post by dtagames »

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 and I'm surprised no one has mentioned Lit or bare metal web components in this convo. I'm starting a large TS project at the AAA game studio where I work (my day job, not DTA) and it wasn't hard to choose to avoid React or Vue or Angular.

Lit is the anti-framework because it isn't a framework. Once you remove all the cruft, you can spend a lot more time writing the code that you want to write and, doing so in the way that you want to do it. Everything discussed in this article is solved by bare metal web components.

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

#115

Post by nophunphil »

candiddevmike wrote: post #58
zero_shift wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven’t tried Solid, but Svelte has already paid considerable dividends for our team. Frontend feature development pace is faster, the code is generally leaner, and the developers love working with it. Is that just down to Svelte, though? Or is it the greenfield effect? Projects always fly quickly at first, when the code is fresh and unconstrained, and you're building the basics. My concern would be when things g…

I would argue it's 100% greenfield effect. A rewrite fixes all the things but introduces new problems. I would bet the OP could've achieved the same effect by figuring out what's wrong with their codebase (which honestly is easier for an outsider to do than someone who has worked on it everyday). And I would caution against converting anything to a non JSX or hyperscript language (like svelte or vue), you don't want…

To clarify, this was new development — not the process of rebuilding of an existing app. For that reason, the greenfield development was indeed simpler.

That being said, it’s been one year and making changes to the Svelte application is (in the developers’ opinions) easier than our set of comparably-sized React applications. Of course, all of this is specific to our team members’ skillsets, the application complexity, etc.

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

#116

Post by hnrodey »

holistio wrote: post #89

...and that's why I switched to Vue nearly four years ago. Best professional decision I've ever made.

Are you finding much "professional traction" with Vue? I really like Vue and use it for personal projects but React seems to dominate the job postings.

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

#117

Post by vore »

pgamble wrote: post #62

Relatively new react developer here (still learning in fact!), I liked this article although it shook me a bit and made me wonder "am I wasting time with some of this stuff? maybe I should be looking ahead to the next 'best framework'". Id be interested in hearing people's thoughts: what would be best to learn for maximum applicability in the ~3 year timeframe?

Learn the theory, not the framework.

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

#118

Post by patcon »

BilalBudhani wrote: post #97
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 dec…

> I realized React is trying to tame Facebook level of problems and hence their design decision steams from those data points.

Strong agreement!

There's a saying in community organizing and activist circles that goes something like:

"Don't apply the solutions of the butterfly to the problems of the caterpillar."

Imho it's a really important consideration when thinking about scale of movements (and nonprofits... and any community initiative...). This is especially true when "professional" people are always coming in and confidently over-applying their learnings in corporations to thinking about activism (which often, though not always, has very different incentive structures and lifecycles).

I think about this parable often in regards how all these scaled tech companies end up stewarding the developer tools and therefore practices for everyone. And they tend to out-pace and out-broadcast other wonderful tools that could better serve the majority of developer niches.

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

#119

Post by wiredearp »

wpietri wrote: post #93
jwlake wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In React terms, "functional" almost always implies the opposite of purely functional. It just means that the component is declared by a function instead of a class. First time you call it, the function can assign state that it may reference in future calls, not unlike the methods of a class. How they actually go about this is however almost entirely weird.

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

#120

Post by nightpool »

goatlover wrote: post #66
elbac wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you use to work in Java?

Coming from Ruby and Python, I also prefer class components to hooks. I had to deal with hooks enough in Drupal/PHP which is in the process of deprecating them in favor of Symfony classes.

Drupal hooks have nothing to do with React hooks except sharing a name. What would cause you to compare the two?
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