Kind of annoyed at React • Hacker News Board

Re: Kind of annoyed at React

#21

Post by ok_dad » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 1:14 AM UTC

breadwinner wrote: post #11

> it’s not clear/an easily understandable mental model for most people That's already the case, thanks to hooks. Hooks are weird, and should not be taught to junior programmers because it will confuse them for the rest of their careers. Hooks are weird because it doesn't align with functional programming paradigm or with OOP paradigm... it is a new paradigm and it is like nothing else. More on that: https://medium.co…

Hooks are a new paradigm? That’s news to me, hooking is at least as old as two decades when I first started programming. Hooks are, like most programming ideas, hard to understand at first but easier as time passes and you see more of them.

Re: Kind of annoyed at React

#22

Post by rmccue » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 1:14 AM UTC

breadwinner wrote: post #11

> it’s not clear/an easily understandable mental model for most people That's already the case, thanks to hooks. Hooks are weird, and should not be taught to junior programmers because it will confuse them for the rest of their careers. Hooks are weird because it doesn't align with functional programming paradigm or with OOP paradigm... it is a new paradigm and it is like nothing else. More on that: https://medium.co…

I agree. Up until Hooks, you could make your own toy React pretty easily if you wanted to - creating a basic, unoptimised version took a few hours. That made the whole system pretty understandable, especially for junior developers - obviously, you'd always pick the battle-hardened, optimised real React for anything serious.

Hooks fundamentally altered the contract about the API that React provided, and suddenly magic was popping up everywhere. Thankfully suspense never really caught on, because that was even more magical.

I do quite like the developer ergonomics of hooks, but it does make me wonder about whether there was a world in which we could have had both the ergonomics _and_ something less magical.

(Aside: that Medium article is available to members only.)

Re: Kind of annoyed at React

#23

Post by lancesells » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 1:15 AM UTC

neya wrote: post #10

Maybe, it's just me - I miss the good old days when sites didn't have anything to do with react or similar. Everything was just plain old hyperlinks and some basic JS. I am not even talking about the 90s, just look at what Facebook used to be in its early days - such a simple UI, just based off of hyperlinks, very basic JS. That simplicity alone made it such a joy to use. Today, I don't even feel like logging into Fa…

I don't think it's just you. Plain hyperlinks coupled with modern connections and equipment feels fast and easy. You click and a page appears. With JS apps they just feel heavy and almost buggy even when it is just a page of text with links.

Maybe I'm just in adt and marketing ech too much but it's almost like I can't be too fast on clicking thing otherwise things get fucked up and lose their states.

Re: Kind of annoyed at React

#24

Post by ricardobeat » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 1:16 AM UTC

brigadier132 wrote: post #9

React is fundamentally bad technology. I know there are historical reasons for the virtual dom but the reasons that justified it don't exist anymore. If you want to do anything interesting with react that involves interacting directly with browser APIs you need to deal with these absurd use effect hoops to initiate state with references to dom nodes. I've worked on 4 large react code bases and they always devolve int…

> they always devolve into these blobs of non-deterministic async state with unpredictable performance

Exact same experience here. I've been banging this drum for years. When hooks came around I thought they might make it better, but alas, we are still in a downwards spiral. Building web apps is 10x more complicated today than it was ten years ago, with nothing to show for it.

I'm happy to see some known voices in the community realizing this, but also sad that this is how things work now. The rise and fall of React will have been both a product of social media / developer celebrities.

Re: Kind of annoyed at React

#25

Post by artdigital » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 1:16 AM UTC

ervine wrote: post #18

breadwinner wrote: post #11

> it’s not clear/an easily understandable mental model for most people That's already the case, thanks to hooks. Hooks are weird, and should not be taught to junior programmers because it will confuse them for the rest of their careers. Hooks are weird because it doesn't align with functional programming paradigm or with OOP paradigm... it is a new paradigm and it is like nothing else. More on that: https://medium.co…

I'll never understand the "hooks are bad" people. I don't find useEffect confusing, creating custom hooks is a breeze, life is so much better than old class components. When I read complaints about hooks I'm either missing something fundamental about why they're bad, or the people complaining are missing it.

Yeah I never found them difficult and they’re making my life so much easier

Curious what specifically about them is difficult or hard to understand?

Re: Kind of annoyed at React

#26

Post by danpalmer » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 1:16 AM UTC

breadwinner wrote: post #11

> it’s not clear/an easily understandable mental model for most people That's already the case, thanks to hooks. Hooks are weird, and should not be taught to junior programmers because it will confuse them for the rest of their careers. Hooks are weird because it doesn't align with functional programming paradigm or with OOP paradigm... it is a new paradigm and it is like nothing else. More on that: https://medium.co…

I don't think new paradigms are a bad thing, I think the problem with hooks is that they are a "clever trick" to work around the fact that the language/runtime does not have the necessary features to support the developer experience that they would ideally have.

What's sad is that the class-based component system did have those necessary features, it also had a nice distinction between components and their lifecycle and the rest of your code. Now with hooks, everything is React lifecycle code, unless you're really smart about your API boundaries, and in my experience no one makes good re-usable hooks that are nicely isolated from business logic.

Re: Kind of annoyed at React

#27

Post by danielvaughn » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 1:16 AM UTC

ervine wrote: post #18

breadwinner wrote: post #11

> it’s not clear/an easily understandable mental model for most people That's already the case, thanks to hooks. Hooks are weird, and should not be taught to junior programmers because it will confuse them for the rest of their careers. Hooks are weird because it doesn't align with functional programming paradigm or with OOP paradigm... it is a new paradigm and it is like nothing else. More on that: https://medium.co…

I'll never understand the "hooks are bad" people. I don't find useEffect confusing, creating custom hooks is a breeze, life is so much better than old class components. When I read complaints about hooks I'm either missing something fundamental about why they're bad, or the people complaining are missing it.

Some people find the mental model to be very confusing. I've been writing hooks for years so intuitively, the behavior has sunk in. But I still admit that it's mind bending to try and understand how it actually works. The original commenter is absolutely correct that it diverges from both functional and OOP, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's reasonable for people to consider it a net negative.

Re: Kind of annoyed at React

#28

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 1:17 AM UTC

breadwinner wrote: post #11

> it’s not clear/an easily understandable mental model for most people That's already the case, thanks to hooks. Hooks are weird, and should not be taught to junior programmers because it will confuse them for the rest of their careers. Hooks are weird because it doesn't align with functional programming paradigm or with OOP paradigm... it is a new paradigm and it is like nothing else. More on that: https://medium.co…

[deleted]

Re: Kind of annoyed at React

#29

Post by ervine » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 1:17 AM UTC

rmccue wrote: post #22

breadwinner wrote: post #11

> it’s not clear/an easily understandable mental model for most people That's already the case, thanks to hooks. Hooks are weird, and should not be taught to junior programmers because it will confuse them for the rest of their careers. Hooks are weird because it doesn't align with functional programming paradigm or with OOP paradigm... it is a new paradigm and it is like nothing else. More on that: https://medium.co…

I agree. Up until Hooks, you could make your own toy React pretty easily if you wanted to - creating a basic, unoptimised version took a few hours. That made the whole system pretty understandable, especially for junior developers - obviously, you'd always pick the battle-hardened, optimised real React for anything serious. Hooks fundamentally altered the contract about the API that React provided, and suddenly magic…

But all the lifecycle methods were magic that needed to be understood... hooks just let you co-locate related logic in one place instead of scattered across 3 or 4 lifecycle methods.

Re: Kind of annoyed at React

#30

Post by brigadier132 » Mon, Jan 15, 2024, 1:17 AM UTC

ervine wrote: post #18

breadwinner wrote: post #11

> it’s not clear/an easily understandable mental model for most people That's already the case, thanks to hooks. Hooks are weird, and should not be taught to junior programmers because it will confuse them for the rest of their careers. Hooks are weird because it doesn't align with functional programming paradigm or with OOP paradigm... it is a new paradigm and it is like nothing else. More on that: https://medium.co…

I'll never understand the "hooks are bad" people. I don't find useEffect confusing, creating custom hooks is a breeze, life is so much better than old class components. When I read complaints about hooks I'm either missing something fundamental about why they're bad, or the people complaining are missing it.

"useEffect" itself is not what is confusing. What's confusing is when you have many dozens of components with effects all loading state asynchronously. Some of them might even be executing callbacks passed as props from parent components. Oh, and then those effects sometimes re-execute when the effects of parent components complete and pass down updated props! It actually reminds me of programming VHDL.