Try typing a full word into each password box. Then, try to undo (Cmd/Ctrl-Z, etc). Backbone's undoes the typing, one letter at a time. React's behaves correctly and undoes the whole word. Good job, React (I still see "controlled" inputs on the web today falling prey to the former)
React vs. Backbone in 2025
11–20 of 245 posts
Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025
#12I think about React vs Backbone from time to time, too, but have drawn different conclusions. Backbone was one of my first "JS frameworks". I thought it was neat, but when React came out, I thought "oh, something actually useful, unlike Backbone, which is mostly application framework glue code, but doesn't actually do all that much for me. Concrete huge wins for me from React were: - Not having to regularly touch the…
Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025
#13I absolutely failed to follow the logic of this article - is there any?
The toy examples having the same amount of code is meaningless. They're saying it's bad because react is more complicated. But this works in react's favor that simple examples are simple.
It's also meaningless because it's a toy example. Even if the react code was half the size of the backbone, you could still use the strawman of "react's complexity isn't worth saving 5 lines of code" which people would agree with.
Then they go on to complain about use-effect and state-management. But use-effect isn't in the code example. But then why compare it to backbone which also doesn't solve those problems and is arguably much worse at them.
> People say "you need to rebuild React from scratch to really understand it," and they're right
Actually laughed at how shameless this is. Who said this? This is just a thing the author got and just decided is a fact. Not only is that quote not in the linked article, I don't think the average person would say this.
And the answer to what about something small, the answer is either lit-dev, or vanilla. It's not early 2010s, a lot of the functionality of libs like jquery, backbone that made them popular was incorporated into js.
Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025
#14A big part of the problem happens well before React though. Lots of people don't even know how JavaScript works despite using it every day. So it's no wonder that people get tripped up trying to understand functional components, useEffect, etc.
Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025
#15You could make a similar comparison between Kotlin and Java and reach the same conclusion. However, Java has evolved significantly over the past 15 years, and most of Kotlin’s features are now also available in Java.
Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025
#16Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025
#17I think about React vs Backbone from time to time, too, but have drawn different conclusions. Backbone was one of my first "JS frameworks". I thought it was neat, but when React came out, I thought "oh, something actually useful, unlike Backbone, which is mostly application framework glue code, but doesn't actually do all that much for me. Concrete huge wins for me from React were: - Not having to regularly touch the…
Does React have built-in state management?
People do add state managers to store state outside the component tree, but a lot of components don't need that.
Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025
#18I think about React vs Backbone from time to time, too, but have drawn different conclusions. Backbone was one of my first "JS frameworks". I thought it was neat, but when React came out, I thought "oh, something actually useful, unlike Backbone, which is mostly application framework glue code, but doesn't actually do all that much for me. Concrete huge wins for me from React were: - Not having to regularly touch the…
Does React have built-in state management?
Class component:
class Counter extends Component {
state = { age: 42 };
handleAgeChange = () => {
this.setState({ age: this.state.age + 1 });
};
render() {
return (
Increment age
You are {this.state.age}.
);
}
}
Functional component: function Counter() {
const [age, setAge] = useState(42);
const handleAgeChange = () => setAge(age + 1);
return (
Increment age
You are {age}.
);
}Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025
#19Try typing a full word into each password box. Then, try to undo (Cmd/Ctrl-Z, etc). Backbone's undoes the typing, one letter at a time. React's behaves correctly and undoes the whole word. Good job, React (I still see "controlled" inputs on the web today falling prey to the former)
Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025
#20I do use react but only for very specific well-defined reusable components and I use js events to message them. I try to keep it as simple as possible. I can't imagine creating an entire site with react.