Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

React is holding me hostage

emnudge.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 553 posts

Re: React is holding me hostage

#251

Post by SgtBastard »

akudha wrote: post #216
codeptualize wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the modern webapp experience is so miserable for the average person. I see this claim a lot and I'm curious what this is based on, can somebody drop some links to further reading?

I have a beefy machine and fast internet. Yet, JIRA is annoyingly slow. Half the time, pages on my bank’s website take forever to load, or don’t load at all. I don’t have any numbers, just some anecdotal experience like the above. It is not just speed. The UI of many sites suck too. Amazon, GoDaddy, for example. Then there are ads. We don’t see ads in between content anymore. It is content within ads these days. I am…

Jira is a not very good product, implemented by worse engineers, that happens to be better than its competitors (ironically proving the point I made further up thread).

Re: React is holding me hostage

#252

Post by zelphirkalt »

ojkelly wrote: post #65
petilon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't call this functional programming. If you call setCount() then this is not functional because your function is doing something besides returning a value. In fact, it is setting state, which is against FP principles.

Most of the ideas at play here come from the functional programming world, which is why it’s often viewed from that lense. React builds on functional reactive programming, something the FP world is known for[0]. I’m not saying it’s pure FP in the dogmatic sense, I just wanted to point out it’s closer to FP than the other paradigms. Without the ability to interact with the outside world (side-effects), FP is not of mu…

The web is (was) a pretty good example of something akin to FP: REST means all state is transferred with the response and then the whole thing is rendered in the browser. And then there is HTTP, so if you want a new page, you simple call another URL (like a function call). OK this is glossing over some parts like that cookies are also send, but they are additional optional arguments of that request (function call). That's what the mean (or meant, since the term is now muddied), when they say the connection is stateless.

What we have with badly written React apps now (90% approx.) is a UI, that is not at all behaving like a typical website and very far from being like FP. We often cannot simply go back with the back button and expect to see the same page rendered. I mean we can, but the websites will fart in our face, if we do. We do not get the ability to simple send a link to someone and have them see the exact same page. It is a huge departure from anything FP.

Furthermore from the dev perspective components feel more mainstream OOP than FP, since they store internal state and update it, which indirectly causes things I described above.

Not sure where people see the FP. Not sure they really have done any FP language before or tried in projects to strictly adhere to FP principles, because that looks a lot differently than React components and mixing state, layout and styling in JSX/TSX.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#253

Post by zelphirkalt »

jameshart wrote: post #60
petilon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't call this functional programming. If you call setCount() then this is not functional because your function is doing something besides returning a value. In fact, it is setting state, which is against FP principles.

Okay. But is it against FP principles to write software that runs in web browsers then? Because web browsers exist, and they work in a nonfunctional way. So to interact with one we need to do a little bit of imperative code. And then react lets us figure out what to do when the web browser responds to that imperative code by letting us run a largely functional program . Which is pretty neat considering we’re doing so…

Web browsers are agnostic to the programming paradigms employed to code websites in. We might need to bend JS a lot to get FP though. JS has some quite procedural roots/basics. For example the timer API (setTimeout and so on).

Re: React is holding me hostage

#254

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

iakov wrote: post #197
codeptualize wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the modern webapp experience is so miserable for the average person. I see this claim a lot and I'm curious what this is based on, can somebody drop some links to further reading?

It feels like a myth to me as well. We, tech nerds, value "optimized" solutions, "beautiful" code. We buy top-notch hardware, remove bloatware, because we really care about our tools and craft. 90% of the users use shitty hardware. Everything is sorta sluggish on their computers - they boot up slowly, the bunch of crapware in autorun take their sweet time to load & phone home, their wifi us overburdened with devices.…

I think if that was the case Apple would be a much smaller company. People buy iPhones because they "feel nice." And the feel they are talking about is performance.

If you are forced to use an app with bad performance (say Teams) you cope. Humans are great at coping. Maybe you turn it off and back on again periodically, or alt tab to something else while it's showing a spinner.

It's true performance isn't a major selling point but IMO that's because most software products are not sold to users. They are packaged with other products, part of monopolies and imposed to users by others.

I buy video games where performance undoubtedly matters. Apart from that, most software I use, I didn't choose, and I'm pleasantly happy when it's not garbage (Outlook, IDEA) and annoyed when it is (Teams, Facebook). In either case, performance wasn't a contributor to my choice: I didn't have a choice.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#255

Post by holbrad »

Illniyar wrote: post #243
humanrebar wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Performance is very very rarely a contributor to a product success. Users prefer more features over more performant app all the time (both directly when asked and indirectly by what products they choose). I close sites all the time when they fail to work quickly. I have aborted orders on sites midway through when the interaction became sluggish enough that I wasn't confident in the value of the product anymore. Thi…

And I never click on Ads. Yet they work and drive a lot of traffic and money to sites. (Even after all the fraud) Products almost never compete on performance, and the biggest, most popular ones are almost always the slower ones. Regardless of your anecdotal evidence, there is a reason why this sentiment is prevalent in the industry - because PMs and devs who thought otherwise were quickly outcompeted by those that m…

Performance is obviously important, to suggest otherwise is just silly.

Both Google and Amazon have researched this topic and the results are readily available. First link I found: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and...

Why do you think there some much time and effort going into improving performance of computing in general. Facebook Lite, android go, GPU's, cpu improvements, 5g, etc.

The important caveat is that once it's fast enough the gains are marginal.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#256

Post by codeptualize »

codeptualize wrote: post #183
thegeomaster wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is performance not important in this context? React is very sluggish when updating many elements at once, for not very large values of "many". With some regularity, I've debugged React+MobX jank issues where a bigger update, such as switching from one panel to another, takes upwards of 200ms on a mid- or low-range machine. None of this is perceptible on our beefy dev boxes, which is why I think people disregard i…

> the modern webapp experience is so miserable for the average person. I see this claim a lot and I'm curious what this is based on, can somebody drop some links to further reading?

I’m seeing a lot of anecdotes, not a lot of research.

Nngroup used to publish analyses of the state of usability, but I don’t think they have done one recently.

The old ones always showed progress, and that’s also what I would expect talking about the average situation.

Average progress doesn’t mean there are no shitty situations and we should always strive to improve, I just think claims like this are not helpful as they are used to make blanket statements about nuanced situations.

Unless you can back them up of course, and I would still love to see the data if anyone can find it.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#257

Post by vinay427 »

dagorenouf wrote: post #240
vouwfietsman wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I agree with the sentiment of your post, #1 is blatantly wrong. Most of my successful work has been specifically outperforming the competition in a way that makes users choose our product. Performance is an orthogonal feature that improves all other features, and even changes what your clients can do with your system, as in making new workflows viable.

That’s highly dependent on the type of product / customers you have. If you’re running an online shop selling ice cream, going from 100ms to 2ms list sorting speed isn’t gonna get you more sales. I’d argue most online products are ice cream shops to some degree.

The data seems to indicate otherwise: https://www.gigaspaces.com/blog/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-...

> A 2017 Akamai study shows that every 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%

> 10 years ago, Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales

Re: React is holding me hostage

#258

Post by NohatCoder »

Meanwhile us Vanilla.js'ers are still wondering exactly what a front-end framework does for a site that displays some text and some images.

It seems like the framework culture is driven by the search for a silver bullet that makes problems go away. But each solution to a problem always comes with its own set of problems, only these problems are initially unknown. So you trade a set of known problems for a set of unknown ones.

It is possible that these new problems are lesser problems, but this is hard to verify upfront, and the nature of being unknown makes it a lot harder to deal with them preemptively.

So anyway, you have your framework, you have used it for a while, and you have learned about the previously unknown problems that it causes. You could rejoice that you now have this knowledge, and therefore have a reasonable shot at working around the problems. But instead you ditch your imperfect framework and search for a new one, beginning the cycle anew.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#259

Post by h9h9h9 »

Illniyar wrote: post #132

I'm still a React guy. I've also worked with Angular and Vue and toyed with Svelte. People tend to compare these frameworks on things that don't matter - often it's performance. We used to compare React performance to AngularJs performance too, which was meaningless. VDom is nice. Reactivity in signals is nice. Limiting rerenders is nice. But I choose frameworks because of developer ergonomics. The killer feature for…

[flagged]

Re: React is holding me hostage

#260

Post by holbrad »

Illniyar wrote: post #250
chiefalchemist wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Performance is very very rarely a contributor to a product success You might as well say, having users is very very rarely a contributor to a product success. We're over two+ decades into the 21st Century and we're still pushing a 20th Century mindset? Why Lord? Why?

I might not as well say that. I in fact said something completely opposite - that users don't care about performance. Hence more features->more users.

That's just simply not true though...

Do users explicitly care about how many milliseconds somethings takes? No definitely not

Do they care if the application feels slow ? Yes absolutely

Do faster experiences subconsciously feel better ? Yes

Does that subconscious feeling, impact metrics like sales or conversion ? Yes it does

Post reply on HN