I remember following up the Angular tutorial. I was about 15min into the tutorial, and I was already editing 8 different files. I never got lost so quickly. I lost a job because I could not use angular, but never felt bad about it. I remember somebody commenting here on HN about a developer conference, where the speakers were bragging about their software being complex. This is an awful trend with software, and is re…
This is why React won: No template language to learn. No prescriptions for managing your app. No piles of abstractions to do basic things. It's just a UI lib. Import it, declare what to paint on-screen, done. Oh, you want routing? "Not my business", says React. Go add a routing library. You want a framework for managing global state? Go find one. Want a kitchen sink frontend solution which bundles all of these common…
Don't get me wrong, in its purest & simplest form it is great. Unfortunately it's very rare you get to leave it like that because we now make web _applications_ instead of static websites.
Most of the time you're actually better off just using html5 with css3 - it's very rare that you truly need something that is "reactive".