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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

#201

Post by CitrusFruits »

zero_shift wrote: post #34
nophunphil wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m also a developer and tech lead who’s been working with React since the beta. Agreed with all your points about React. I’m not sure I would say Svelte and Solid are a farther step off the “just JavaScript” path than React given JSX though. 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 develo…

> 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 can confirm Svelte is way easier, leaner, and quicker to work with than React. The exception is, of course, the library support, which is a huge drawback and would make me cautious of using it in a business setting for another year or two.

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

#202

Post by FinalBriefing »

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…

Vue has been my favorite since Vue 2. It hits the right balance for me between the opinionated Angular and "you figure it out" React. It does what I want a JS framework to do: binds values and renders views with minimal setup (computed properties solve so many common problems).

Also, it has amazing ESLint rules that really help keep all your code aligned and following best practices.

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

#203

Post by azemetre »

nightpool wrote: post #24
nsonha wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is poorly documented about react-hook-form? I like the documentation a lot, and it's creator is EXTREMELY responsive regarding github issues & discussions and on their discord as well.

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

#204

Post by not_kurt_godel »

pdntspa wrote: post #159
molszanski wrote: post #149

Hmm… let me be frank about my experiences with React. I’ve been using React heavily for far over 6 or 7 years. React is amazing. And what I see is that people find so many ways to shoot themselves in the foot. At the same time, I understand that batteries-not-included approach will lead to that result. First of all, people get out of their skin and try to make it a complicated and entangled mess. In programming, ther…

Where are good examples of clean, well-implemented React code by your definition? Because your comment perfectly encapsulates my experiences and frustrations in learning and using React off-and-on over the past 8 years or so. React is the one tech that really freaks me out because every time I have to dive into it, it's a completely different beast and it feels like so many people actually writing in React are just e…

> your comment perfectly encapsulates my experiences

> feels like so many people actually writing in React are just effing CRAZY

Same here. We had an experienced-but-batshit-crazy dev create a React site with approximately 250,000 LOC to support 3 forms with a max of 4 simple inputs and a 3-column data table view. To this day it makes my head spin how it is even theoretically possible to write that much code for so little functionality - much less _actually do it_. And don't even get me started on how unmaintainable it is - IIRC I tried to update the string content of an error message once and it required changing something like 57 lines in 10 files (or maybe it was 1 line in 57 different files? something like that...).

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

#205

Post by krikou »

dtagames wrote: post #114
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 th…

Indeed, lit is fantastic.

It is built on top of web-standard; I am surprised how (lit)tle attention it gets on HN (so far).

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

#206

Post by azemetre »

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?

Don't call yourself a react dev, it's unlikely this framework will be around in 10 years time (see what was popular in frontend dev 10 years ago). Call yourself a developer and try to learn the core tech, if you're a web developer that means javascript and html.

All these libraries are built on JS, understanding JS is the safest bet you can make.

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

#207

Post by Jasper_ »

joshribakoff wrote: post #166

Concurrent react actually makes your app less concurrent: https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/21668 5yrs in progress, it’s still not documented let alone fixed. I tried to look at the code, and they make giant PRs and are experimenting with priority queues and bitmasks, which seemed pretty off in the weeds to me.

Oh wow. I was always skeptical of "concurrent React" (the scheduler approach seemed insane to me), but this seems like such a basic issue, I'm surprised this ever shipped in any form.

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

#208

Post by jwlake »

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?

Functional components are great in that they are more terse, less boilerplate.

Class components just have more lines, more boilerplate, so they have a higher cognitive load. But when you have state, you have more complexity, you can't just wave your hand wave and make it go away. You need to take the complexity into account.

Hooks are trying to do hand waving. The thing is, once you get to non-trivial use cases, the handwaving stops working. You're better off thinking a lot about where you state lives in your component hierarchy, and then limit your state to where you really need it. Once you do that the overhead of class components doesn't really make that big a deal.

The same principle applies to almost everything in programming, the more thought you put into structure, the simpler you can make everything.

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

#209

Post by cooperadymas »

nightpool wrote: post #120
goatlover wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sharing the same name, I presume.

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

#210

Post by randomsearch »

nutanc wrote: post #57

We tried to use other frameworks but finally came back to React for only one reason. It's easier to hire for React. The talent pool for React is almost 10 times that of other frameworks. And for now, this reason is good enough for us.

Vue is learnable in a single day. React is almost as easy to learn.

Just hire React devs and give them a couple of days with Vue, no problem

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