React I love you, but you're bringing me down • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by rglover » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #353

rglover wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of people who have sent me this exact meme for daring to offer an alternative is quite illuminating of why it's so hard to make progress. Not picking on you, but dogmatic thinking is why OPs article even exists. Don't substitute memes for thinking. Evaluate what I've built on its actual merits.

Respectfully, I don't have the time or interest to, and to be quite honest while I am qualified to implement just about anything you want in vanilla JS, jQuery, [old versions of] Angular, React, or Vue2, I'm very likely not qualified to judge a brand new one on its merits other than just a superficial comparison to the ones I've used before.

So why post something snarky and try to discourage me?

Serious question: what was the motivating factor that made you take the time to reach for that cartoon and respond to me with it?

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

#382

Post by markeibes » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 10:17 PM UTC

exclusiv wrote: post #357

corytheboyd wrote: post #190

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, and honestly I'd rather it be in a big ball of frontend than in the data models, infrastructure, etc. I disagree. I like my frontend to be as dumb as possible. It gets data and reacts to it as simple as possible. Seen too many frontends with a lot of data logic and it becomes extremely brittle, harder to test. These are the ones where the frontend d…

Why? What's the difference?

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

#383

Post by iLoveOncall » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

exclusiv wrote: post #375

iLoveOncall wrote: post #88

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…

I have an Angular 1 app I built in 2015 that's still in use today. Went back to it and it was refreshing in so many ways. A lot of people really hated it but it's opinions and structure helped promote a more maintainable codebase. I don't miss tuning watchers and the digest cycle though. All the React projects I've inherited are nightmares. I'm comfortable working on them but they are harder for junior and mid-levels…

Have you given a try to Angular 2 and above?

Angular (Angular 2+) is honestly lightyears ahead of what AngularJS (Angular 1) was, so if you already preferred AngularJS over React, Angular will be a walk in the park.

I feel like a lot of people who talk about Angular being bad are actually talking about AngularJS and have never tried the newer versions.

For collaboration and onboarding new people, it's hard to do things badly in Angular, and it's easy to refactor when they are done badly, so it's a great choice.

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

#384

Post by draw_down » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

corytheboyd wrote: post #190

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#385

Post by iLoveOncall » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

postalrat wrote: post #165

iLoveOncall wrote: post #88

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.

Sure, if you have only a very basic 1 page website with no routing, no backend calls, no components to reuse, etc. React will be a simpler and better choice.

If you have anything more complex than that, like a real web application, Angular is an actual frontend framework, where React is just the modern jQuery.

Angular is for software engineers, React is for web developers.

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

#386

Post by sibeliuss » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 10:26 PM UTC

swyx wrote: post #376

sibeliuss wrote: post #371

How has nobody mentioned the insane complexity monster that is React 18 / Suspense?! I mean, it makes sense once you understand it, but who is going to understand it? React's concurrency features should have been broken off into a separate, opt-in library, not packaged into React core, and they sealed their own coffin with this release. That said, suspense is awesome once it's fully understood. Give the public a few…

suggesting the concurrency features can simply be broken off is evidence that you may not understand them as well as you imply.

Sorry, to clarify: What I'm suggesting is that React 18's changes were substantial enough to have been broken off into a separate library, not maintained inside of React. I don't mean to diminish the teams amazing work here, but they're overkill for 90% of the developer community who are already having a hard time understanding all of the abstractions that have made it in since hooks were added. All of this is _overwhelming_ given how simple React was at one point in time.

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

#387

Post by cillian64 » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 10:26 PM UTC

randomsearch wrote: post #212

Any general coders wondering about React as their first front end framework - just use Vue. It’s easier, makes quite a lot more sense, has a “one true way” approach regarding many topics and can be comfortably learnt in a day. It’s easier for others to understand your code too. JSX yuck.

I’m an embedded/backend dev looking to tinker with some frontend stuff for the experience and out of curiosity. I’ve been leaning towards react because it’s so common and what my team use, but I’m finding it pretty hard to get into.

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

#388

Post by UlisesAC4 » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 10:35 PM UTC

divs1210 wrote: post #250

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is something very weird indeed. Functional components are called every time they're rendered (that's not weird). But they have to maintain state between calls; they can't start over again fresh for each call/render (still not weird). So how do they do this? `const [state, setState] = useState(initialValue)`. You might look at that and think, I see useState being called, so it must be called on each render,…

That is bonkers, to be honest. I've used React a lot, but only via Reagent in ClojureScript. I think the JS people are being scammed.

It is bonkers. My number of "accidental" re renders on react are greater than before hooks.

Before at least I knew what was called on boostrap moments. Now everything is run as a side effect when any dependency change. My needs on checking if a prop or a dependency has changed hasn't evolved at all. I just have the core of my side effects on useEffect.

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

#389

Post by skydhash » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 10:37 PM UTC

nightski wrote: post #335

engineeringwoke wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would Facebook convince the community to dogfood their new API without some marketing buzz? It's pretty obvious that V8 has trouble optimizing changes to object properties because of the design of the spec, and they were also pretty open about it in the blogs where hooks were introduced. I think it's also clear that useEffect is harder to grok than it's lifecycle equivalents, so there might be other things at pla…

I was just going off my own experience with React through the years. It was very hard to compose behavior with class based components. We had to create higher order components that had functions as children which could pass down data as arguments to the child function. It really made a mess of the component hierarchy. Now you can create reusable custom hooks that can be used from any component.

I agree with you. It's much better to have useAuth everywhere than having WithAuth capping every class.

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

#390

Post by itake » Tue, Sep 20, 2022, 10:40 PM UTC

BilalBudhani wrote: post #277

buscoquadnary wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I don't agree with you. I have been doing Rails development for past 10 years now and I never faced a dilemma where the framework took a direction which isn't aligned with its core vision. I have been just trying to find a similar tool for frontend where I don't have to keep rewriting the entire codebase.

What about the webpack rails7 situation? I feel like rails has guessed wrong too many times about FE (coffeescript, asset pipeline, websockets) that I don't trust them to deliver their own stack.