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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

#301

Post by bot41 »

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…

Got a good example of business logic not being in a component? Looking to learn.

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

#302

Post by KronisLV »

gherkinnn wrote: post #177
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.

They absolutely do not have their place. Just about everything is worse with class components. I’ll take a dozen useEffects over a single class component any day. That said, the hooks model is far from perfect. They give you a lot of rope to hang yourself with and were badly introduced. Within weeks the internet was ablaze with terrible advice. When so many people get it wrong, the library is to blame. And I wish hoo…

> I’ll take a dozen useEffects over a single class component any day.

Someone actually did in a project once and that lead to render loops that were hard to debug or solve: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/modern-reac...

Instead of a clear message about what caused that loop and maybe a walkthrough of the last N iterations (which changes caused which logic to be triggered), the error message was just a vague and lazy error (even AngularJS errors were better back in the day, filling in details in the docs as URL parameters).

Then again, over the years I've formed the opinion that both approaches are bad, just in different ways. There is no silver bullet, just look at how even desktop software and UI solutions struggled to be workable throughout the decades, of course things won't be that much better in regards to front end.

However, Vue's approach to hooks seems refreshing: creating and nesting components still isn't as easy as in React, but getting things done feels a little bit less cryptic and not as confusing, especially with something like Pinia!

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

#303

Post by nop_slide »

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…

AlpineJS fits my needs for simple sites.

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

#304

Post by bot41 »

miohtama wrote: post #70

I was using React earlier for many years, but nowadays Svelte and SvelteKit (file based routing). I feel I am more productive (might be an illusion), but at least I am less frustrated. More here: https://kit.svelte.dev/

Is Svelte still overly dependent on Rich Harris? He's great but that reliance put me off Svelte.

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

#305

Post by yurishimo »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #147
BilalBudhani wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Step 1: The existing tooling is too clunky, big and a major PITA to work with, Developers spend most of their time fighting their framework and tooling to do simple things. Step 2: Someone gets fed up with this writes a framework that "does things right" and is designed for "simplicity" Step 3: People start loving the new tool because it is so much easier to work with. Step 4: People start to do things the tool wasn'…

> The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Web 2.0 Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the great mountainous island of FANNG. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”

I've never seen this before, but I'm stealing it!

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

#306

Post by chrisco255 »

xtracto wrote: post #213
rafale wrote: post #29

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.

Yes yes yes! I´ve done some React at my job and also done some Angular/Ionic before. What I never understood of React is why did the creators decided to throw DECADES of Software Engineering development and comingle presentation layer with logic... To separate Views from Logics was an agreed good practice in Software Engineering since I was in undergard school 20 years ago.

Because you will inevitably need to use control flow, conditional rendering, and computed values in your components. And creating proprietary HTML syntax (ie ngIf) to cross reference variables defined in the JS anyways. So why not use JS and gain access to powerful array manipulation, ternary operators, map/reduce/filter functionality, etc instead of leaning on an inferior template syntax?

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

#307

Post by Rapzid »

acemarke wrote: post #283
Rapzid wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it seems suss AF. IIRC it also only bales out during the DOM update phase; not during the calls to render() and then reconciliation(?). And if it bales out, it has to re-render everything again when it comes back to make sure the state is consistent(nothing has changed). The exact details are fuzzy and that may be incorrect but the impression I came away with after reading an engineering post about the deets wa…

> it also only bales out during the DOM update phase; not during the calls to render() and then reconciliation(?) It's exactly the opposite. React splits work into two parts: the "render phase", where it loops over components and asks them to describe the UI they want (returning JSX/elements); and the "commit phase", where it has determined the changes that _need_ to happen to the DOM. The render phase is the part th…

Thanks for the correction and references.

Sounds like a nightmare.

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

#308

Post by KronisLV »

gherkinnn wrote: post #236
mmis1000 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think hook themselves are a bad thing. But the way react implements hook probably is. The react team invented their hook format the suite themselves the most, but that probably isn't for other. Vue 3 also has hook now. But none of these defects in the article exist. In vue. To use some value in a effect, you just use it and it is tracked. If you need to clear up your code. You cut some code into a useXxx func…

Vue 1.x was great, v2 lost its way, and Vue 3 with the composition API looks fantastic on paper. (I haven’t used it in any meaningful way) I’m even more impressed with the extended Vue ecosystem like Vite, Vitest.

> Vue 3 with the composition API looks fantastic on paper. (I haven’t used it in any meaningful way)

Recently worked on migrating a large codebase over from a legacy solution to Vue 3 with composition API, it was a pretty enjoyable experience, especially with Pinia!

Though I'd say that the problem was that most component libraries/frameworks out there actually don't support Vue 3 well enough. Last I checked, only the following were viable with Vue 3:

  - Ant Design
  - Element Plus
  - PrimeVue (went with this, also has icons and a layout solution; also alternatives available for React and Angular)
Most of the other ones considered weren't quite there yet:

  - Vuetify
  - Quasar
  - BootstrapVue
  - Vue Material
  - Buefy
  - View UI
  - Vuikit
  - Chakra UI
I mean, is it really so hard to get a bunch of pre-built components for Vue 3 with Bootstrap, or Bulma? It feels a bit like the Python 2 to Python 3 migration in some respects.

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

#309

Post by ajkjk »

imbnwa wrote: post #289
H1Supreme wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! If the Javascript implementation was better, React probably never would have had to come up with Hooks in the first place.

You can solve the problem Hooks purported to solve in plain, idiomatic JavaScript with classes[0] [0] https://raganwald.com/2016/07/20/prefer-composition-to-inher...

This thread may have an OP who prefers classes, but I'm for one 100% in favor of hooks. You could struggle and suffer to solve them with classes, or you could move on to something better.

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

#310

Post by bot41 »

reducesuffering wrote: post #101
collyw wrote: post #45

Does anyone do server side rendering these days? I fail to see the point in SPA apps for the majority of web apps. At my work we have an ancient Dojo frontend and a newer react one being build. Its a few list views that the user can filter and a few forms with validation. It's a ridiculous amount of complexity to avoid loading a page. I could do almost everything for half the effort with server side HTML from Django…

> Does anyone do server side rendering these days? Yes, in React, with Next.js. I'm going to have to dynamically create html and attach event handlers based on data either way. Much rather do it all in Typescript than remember Django templates DSL and still do javascript, for the result of worse UI's, poor 3p library support, and awful state management between frontend and backend.

Or with Remix Run which is great
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