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

marmelab.com

341–350 of 574 posts

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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

woah woah hold on there young one This isn't that. My hostile working definition of a framework is something that . breaks core assumptions about a language or system . limits what a user is permitted to do . increases complexities by adding new abstractions . has non-specific specifications by using unclear and imprecise language At the end you are hardly writing software. Instead you're deep into a world of new abs…

That reads like a parody to me - the cynical engineer that uses conspirational thinking patterns to create a narrative of the world when emergent outcomes are the causes. Look for counterexamples where your cause incentives don’t exist yet the same outcomes still do: that is scientific thinking. > Job security by ensuring brittle applications > Endless tasks by ensuring endless complexity > A sense of elitism and ent…

Done both.

This phenomena can also happen organically.

All these things are tools and you can wrestle with tools or have them make life easier.

The question is about in what direction this tools assuage the creative process.

I've had the luck of seeing and being involved in codebases to both billion dollar successes and million dollar moneypits.

There's certainly patterns and difference I've seen.

The most notable one is successes seen to use a lot of boring unexciting old software with ugly websites.

Like say emacs, that's got an ugly old site. Or what about GCC? How about the Apache site? It doesn't even hype up how amazing and easy your life is with their simple and elegant efficient masterpiece. What about debian.org? FFTW? PCRE? Sqlite? imagemagick?

Now compare this with react and vue.

One is "we have this tool" and the other makes lofty emotional pleas about your relationship with your work. They're fundamentally different approaches and thus have fundamentally different outcomes.

One accomplishes a goal while the other accomplishes an affectation.

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

#342

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…

> when I need to develop a reactive piece of UI I reach out for Svelte

I never used Svelte, but I feel that "develop a reactive piece of UI" is basically Stimulus' job description. Can you explain a scenario/task where Stimulus does so poorly, that you flip the switch and use Svelte instead?

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

#343
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't got the ideas why many frontend jobs require experience in React whether it's for a new or existing projects, maybe I need enlightenment.

Because HR (and IT strategy) nowadays is a farce, managers, decision-makers and the actual organizational units that do hiring rarely have the necessary systemic big-picture knowledge/information, foresight, experience, longitudinal thinking that would allow them to venture out of their preset suboptimal ways.

Are you suggesting that requiring React experience for a job where you will use React is not a reasonable ask?

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

#344

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…

I've went back to server rendered templates/html, and I'm using Unpoly (1) for adding interaction and partial updates where necessary. I also have a couple Lit (2) components for a part of the app that should work offline.

(1) https://unpoly.com/ (2) https://lit.dev/

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, I'm with you. React inventing a half-baked, partial re-implementation of objects/classes (in a language that already has them!) with super-weird declaration syntax & runtime behavior, just to avoid telling their userbase "Ok you will have to use classes sometimes, for certain functionality", was when I started looking around, because they were clearly out of real problems to solve that were sufficiently good-lo…

The cycle of javascript libraries: * SHOW HN: UberTinyUltra.js Here's my new super light-weight 4k Javascript Library! * How I switched to UberTinyUltra.js from PopularFramework.js and simplified my life! * SuperCoolStartup switches to UberTinyUltra.js * How I built my unicorn on UberTinyUltra.js * UberTinyUltra.js 2.0 now with a compiler, classes, typesafety and a C++ like turing complete template language to take o…

React is coming up on 10 years since its release. That world you describe is far from reality nowadays.

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, I'm with you. React inventing a half-baked, partial re-implementation of objects/classes (in a language that already has them!) with super-weird declaration syntax & runtime behavior, just to avoid telling their userbase "Ok you will have to use classes sometimes, for certain functionality", was when I started looking around, because they were clearly out of real problems to solve that were sufficiently good-lo…

The cycle of javascript libraries: * SHOW HN: UberTinyUltra.js Here's my new super light-weight 4k Javascript Library! * How I switched to UberTinyUltra.js from PopularFramework.js and simplified my life! * SuperCoolStartup switches to UberTinyUltra.js * How I built my unicorn on UberTinyUltra.js * UberTinyUltra.js 2.0 now with a compiler, classes, typesafety and a C++ like turing complete template language to take o…

Well. Life moves in waves, but historically, over a long enough time frame (and if we manage not to kill ourselves), more lessons will be learned than lost, and life gets increasingly better.

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

#347
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…

I do. I'm an extremely happy user of Unpoly.

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

#348

It may be due to the codebase I'm working on, but I doubt it since I assume I have decent colleagues (I'm in a FAANG), but I just fucking hate React. I spent years working on Angular before changing team, and there everything makes sense instantly. It's just normal programming, normal MVC, normal everything, and you basically only need to learn about the syntaxic sugar for data-binding and stuff like this. In React i…

Funny because every time I need to work on anything angular I'm constantly thinking how over-engineered everything is and how much simpler it is in react.

Have you read the article?

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

#349

...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.

Less jobs, less developers. It adds up.

Also, building a team is much easier. If you bring six React developers around a table, they will have six different ideas about the parts of the ecosystem they like and use.

Six Vue developers? They’re ready to kick ass from day 0.

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

#350

I've worked in a few roughly-the-same-size (~50 engineers) web development shops. It's always the same. Doesn't matter if it's React, Angular, Class based components, Functional components with hooks, Just Some HTML, PHP, Rails views, etc. The frontend just collects the cruft of a product organization changing course very frequently. There are always a dozen half-finished fix-the-world ideas conflicting with each oth…

> Some part of your organizations chaos is going to reflect in code,

This is reality, and why organizational chaos is so painful for engineers.

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