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React is holding me hostage

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Re: React is holding me hostage

#351

Post by tekkk »

azangru wrote: post #347
philliphaydon wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How is this example from vue docs: preferable to the jsx version: or even this loop example from the vue docs: {{ item.message }} better than its jsx counterpart? items.map(item => ( {item.message} ))

For one you don't have to write an arbitrary key={item.id}. What if you don't have a unique ID? And even if you do, it's just busywork.

Then, what about conditionals? Or slots? Or classNames instead of classes? The saving grace of JSX is that it allows the creation of multiple small components inside a single file.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#353

Post by postalrat »

philliphaydon wrote: post #337
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…

I see JSX as js with a macro to make the createElement calls a bit easier to read. It's not html at all.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#354

Post by Yiin »

azangru wrote: post #347
philliphaydon wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How is this example from vue docs: preferable to the jsx version: or even this loop example from the vue docs: {{ item.message }} better than its jsx counterpart? items.map(item => ( {item.message} ))

Doesn't change the point, but it's usually

Re: React is holding me hostage

#355

Post by yamtaddle »

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…

> React hooks are an interesting and tricky thing to put in a box, because they’re almost monads, almost thunks, almost algebraic effects. The interplay with fibers and components makes them hard to pin down, but they are much closer to functional than any other paradigm.

They're almost classes (/objects). The implementation is what it'd look like if you wanted to make a weird half-assed OO... thing. Property and method declarations, getting attached (ultimately) to an object. But it's FIFO access/calling, rather than using named properties and methods w/ a lookup step. And the declaration syntax is bizarre and hard to read. And they're slower than regular JS OO (because they add an extra layer of JS on top of it).

Re: React is holding me hostage

#356

Post by philliphaydon »

azangru wrote: post #347
philliphaydon wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How is this example from vue docs: preferable to the jsx version: or even this loop example from the vue docs: {{ item.message }} better than its jsx counterpart? items.map(item => ( {item.message} ))

JSX forces you into small tiny components because anything of any decent size becomes unmanageable. There's way too much mixing of JS into the template.

Vue you can do

    Submit
In React I've seen people do:

    if (!props.isFormValid) {
        return Submit;
    }

    return Submit;
This is just an example, obviously you can write this better in React. My point is there's /always/ so much conditional markup like this in every react project I've come across or worked on.

Edit: I donno how to format code on here sorry. (oh figured it out, bunch of spaces)

Re: React is holding me hostage

#357

Post by quest88 »

tomgp wrote: post #196
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,…

My position isn't that we should be using a new library per se. It's that we should be more selective about what 3rd party code we use and espescially what we ship to end users. React has tended towards a kitchen sink approach and this is exacerbated by initial design shortcomings/decisions i.e. no built in state management or method for encapsulating styles has lead to a deluge of libraries that promise to fill the…

Wait react is a kitchen sink approach but in the same breath you said it doesn't come with everything. Do you mean tended away?

Re: React is holding me hostage

#358

Post by jmull »

wokwokwok wrote: post #177
KyeRussell wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your dislike for ‘templates’ is much more a matter of personal preference than you’re letting on. Using language like “still using templates” makes me think that you don’t see any valid opposing view. I do not like JSX. It’s not worth talking about why. It’s not an argument I want to have. But framing non-JSX approaches as objectively inferior is not in tune with the reality, being that this is something sensible peo…

> Templates are a no go for me It’s pretty hard to get more “this is my opinion rather than a statement of objective fact” than this. > I do not like JSX. It’s not worth talking about why. It’s not an argument I want to have. Ok. Um… well, it’s hard to have a discussion if you won’t talk about it… …but, “code” templates allow autocomplete and type checking in a way that is an objectively distinctive superset of text…

I have no idea why JSX wouldn't be considered a DSL template language?

I guess there are specific features you find compelling: it's typed, has good tooling for completions in your editor?

These exist in other template languages, and ones that transform more readily to HTML (which is the goal, don't forget).

Maybe you also value that it has a straight-forward, well-defined transformation to javascript?

That's OK, but since HTML is the goal, it doesn't seem right to optimize for an intermediate representation. To me it's a weakness of react that you have to work with HTML as javascript (which JSX mitigates fairly well, but is hardly ideal).

If you want to have it all, try Svelte.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#359

Post by unxdfa »

nerdywordy wrote: post #245
unxdfa wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you are living in the real world. Most React applications do not end up like that in the real world. They turn into poorly architected over complicated nightmares, particularly on sprawling apps which is the reality in the corporate space. Not everyone is building hyper-focused single function tools which can be crammed in an SPA type framework. And the users suffer for this. One of the finest turds I'v…

RE: Microsoft 1) MSFT has already used React for far longer than 2 years. 2) They have basically never used the technologies you mentioned (WPF, Silverlight, WinUI). They offer them as UI toolkits that run in their Windows environment and that’s it. Their failure to market and support these technologies is independent of what they do for their own development strategy. 3) They bought GitHub and effectively own electr…

1. Correct.

2. Yes they have. Half their developer tools were rewritten in WPF, they offered huge stacks including CRM on top of Silverlight and a huge chunk of windows 11 front end is WinUI.

3. Teams fucking sucks. VS Code is heading in the same direction. I've never used Azure Data Studio.

Re: React is holding me hostage

#360

Post by philliphaydon »

tekkk wrote: post #351
azangru wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this example from vue docs: preferable to the jsx version: or even this loop example from the vue docs: {{ item.message }} better than its jsx counterpart? items.map(item => ( {item.message} ))

For one you don't have to write an arbitrary key={item.id}. What if you don't have a unique ID? And even if you do, it's just busywork. Then, what about conditionals? Or slots? Or classNames instead of classes? The saving grace of JSX is that it allows the creation of multiple small components inside a single file.

> The saving grace of JSX is that it allows the creation of multiple small components inside a single file.

That's definitely not the saving grace of JSX. As I said, every react project is soooooooo overly abstracted into the tiniest little components. It's no wonder people /think/ react is slow.

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