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React is holding me hostage

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Re: React is holding me hostage

#331

Post by grumple »

simmerup wrote: post #151
bayesian_horse wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Performance" matters a lot less than many other things like collaborating with other people, or getting the DOM manipulation right.

I read this sentiment as basically saying the users experience of the app matters less than the experience of the dev who works on it.

If a page is taking too long to render or interact for regular web usage, it's almost certainly not because of React. Clearly there are extremely performant applications using it at the highest levels of scale and complexity (Facebook, Twitter, many others).

Re: React is holding me hostage

#332

Post by giovannibonetti »

One alternative is the Model-View-Update framework developed in the Elm language [1]. A few years ago, it influenced Redux [2], but JS doesn't have good ergonomics to support it, so people complained it was too verbose. Anyway, I brought Elm to the company I worked at two jobs ago, and it worked very well, since it is conceptually very simple. The experienced developers loved its explicitness, which made it possible to build a very intricate app from just a few dependencies, which in turn allowed the company to have a very fine-grained control of the UI, and the customers loved the result.

On the other hand, other less experienced developers didn't like Elm so much because React allows you to write your app with fewer lines of code. The article from this discussion explains well that React (especially with hooks) hides complexity, which bites people later. At that time, it is perhaps too late to switch to something else.

Needless to say, I haven't been able to convince any other employer to use Elm, and then I see issues popping out all the time that would never happen with it. Such a waste, just because people like shiny toys and just follow what others around them are doing without thinking too much.

[1] https://elm-lang.org/ [2] https://redux.js.org/understanding/history-and-design/prior-...

Re: React is holding me hostage

#333

Post by fidgewidge »

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.

People pretty regularly say they buy iPhones because of the very smooth UI (performance), that they buy an ARM Mac because it's so much faster, etc. Google won partly because it was so fast.

So people do explicitly justify usage decisions with performance, all the time. Agreed that overall features win out but it's often the case that multiple products end up with broadly comparable sets of features and struggle to gain a persistent advantage there. Once you reach that point, perf can be a competitive advantage.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#334

Post by InsomniacL »

holbrad wrote: post #255
Illniyar wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imp…

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

Based off how slow every SaaS service is in the B2B space, performance isn't important in all scenarios.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#335

Post by giovannibonetti »

ajani wrote: post #318

I can't help but sigh exhaustedly. There was a moment in time angular was the thing. And then x. And another. And React. The problem each of them tried to solve, and continue to try to solve is purely lexical in the end. It's about writing things differently. Creating abstractions (terms) beyond what the underlying language/platform allows you to do. And this is not a bad thing. The solution really is to create your…

> The solution really is to create your own language so you can express the problem you are solving in the terms of the problem and not the underlying language/platform/hardware.

That's what Elm is about. I've talked about it in another thread, so I won't repeat myself here.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#336

Post by timeon »

thegeomaster wrote: post #141
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…

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…

Common sentiment here is that developer ergonomics is more valuable than user experience.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#337

Post by philliphaydon »

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…

There's 2 things that I hate about react.

1) JSX - It's terrible. Svelte, Vue, Riot... they all got it right. JSX, mixing a weird syntax of HTML and JS together is just inferior to HTML with additional markup.

2) I don't know why but every react project has crazy levels of abstraction. Everything is 15 layers deep and making any sort of change requires way too much effort to navigate 15 files and code reading to make the most mundane changes. Other libraries seem to suffer from this to a far smaller scale.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#338

Post by amrocha »

weatherlite wrote: post #247
Accacin wrote: post #186

The whole thing around React is odd to me. People laugh at web development, especially the frontend, for changing libraries every week but you read a thread like this and everyone is so sure that React is a bad library and we should be using some newer library instead. I work with React daily and it has issues, but I find most issues can be worked around without much trouble. It's easy to hire people, onboard people,…

> It's easy to hire people, onboard people Yes they'll know the React part. It's the Redux/Mobx/React Router/whatever snowflake libraries you chose part that will be more difficult. I really don't like incomplete solutions personally.

Well, don't use those. Pure React is enough 95% of the time, and then an additional 4.9% can be handled with jotai in a couple of places.

React + GraphQL + jotai is my preferred stack

Re: React is holding me hostage

#339

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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, Amazon, possibly godaddy all predate modern-day tools like React and Angular by at least a decade though; Jira seems to have a custom set, Amazon probably does as well.

But in most cases, front-end technology isn't the limiting factor.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#340

Post by manmal »

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…

What’s the alternative to useEffect? I need it very often.
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