React vs. Backbone in 2025 • Hacker News Board

Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025

#151

Post by KingMob » Sat, Oct 25, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

qudat wrote: post #93

austin-cheney wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Components are themselves a form of added complexity. The idea is to deliver a composed and self contained code island. To accomplish this you have a big ball of markup, presentation, event handling, business logic description, and then security and accessibility logic to compensate for the prior mentioned abstractions. What you see in your editor may not look like much, but just under the hood is a colossal mountain…

I’m not sure i could disagree more with a statement. Reacts innovation is simple: view is a function of state. Before that we had to construct the ui imperatively where we managed state AND ui transitions to state changes. Now we mostly just focus on rendering a ui based on the snapshot of state we have. It is revolutionary (for ui dev), it is scalable, it is the reason why react STILL dominates the ui landscape. Rea…

To be precise, React was the first (afaik) to apply that to web UI, but definitely not the first to apply that to UI in general.

The basic idea of a unidirectional loop is how video games were built for years before React.

Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025

#152

Post by jitl » Sat, Oct 25, 2025, 4:24 PM UTC

panphora wrote: post #127

ZvG_Bonjwa wrote: post #58

There is, I think, a sort of innocent arrogance that comes with people who boldly claim that renowned, well-adopted frameworks or technologies are straight up bad or a non-improvement over yesterday’s tech. That’s not to say popularity guarantees quality, that progress is always positive, or that there’s not plenty to criticise. But I do think authors of articles like this sometimes get a big hit from being subversiv…

Author here. The "paleo influencer" comparison is interesting, but I think it actually works both ways here. Yes, there's a temptation to romanticize the past and dismiss modern tools. But there's an equally strong tendency to assume that newer, more popular, and more widely-adopted automatically means better. React didn't just win on pure technical merit. It has Facebook's marketing muscle behind it, it became a hir…

Did you work on any big backbone apps professionally? We had a huge one at Airbnb where after a certain scale any change by anyone - from new grad to expert - could get stuck in 2 days of debugging pure incidental complexity. Change some ui dom structure? Oops you broke someone’s selector and their event won’t fire anymore. Send an update at the wrong time? Render loop.

Switching to React for that app (and everything else) was such a godsend. Once React landed in the codebase it spread like wildfire because of how eager everyone was to burn down the old way!

To me the “it succeeded because marketing” rings hollow because my experience at the time was:

- people loved their MVC ideas and “semantic makeup”, putting template in the JS was so WEIRD and ICKY. And no doubt the compile step for JSX still is annoying one-time complexity. Lots of resistance / thinking React was dumb.

- then you hear about someone on another team replacing a small but annoying feature with React and how relieved they are to be out of backbone hell

- you try yourself, it’s a weird new world and you struggle a bit with the new concepts. Hit a few sharp edges.

- after a week and a half you can’t go back.

- after 6 months (almost) everyone on every team wants to rewrite to React. (We had a few front end leads clinging to their Separation of Concerns as though changing class names on a node in backbone wouldn’t break a zillion event handlers)

If definitely became The Way and self reenforcing, but in my mind that happened primarily out of merit.

Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025

#153

Post by xixixao » Sat, Oct 25, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

React scales. If you can predict the future, if you know your app’s complexity won’t grow, you can choose one of the “simpler” alternatives (and go against the ecosystem trend).

Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025

#154

Post by ysavir » Sat, Oct 25, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

diegof79 wrote: post #134

I worked with Backbone, Angular 1, Ember, and then React. The article overlooks the problems that made React popular: - Composition: Composing components is easier and more efficient in React. Backbone’s render function assumes "this.$el" is mounted and available in the DOM. That makes composition difficult: you cannot simply nest one component inside another without managing the DOM lifecycle of subcomponents. You d…

That's all true, but I think the article's point still stands: React trades one set of compromises for another, and regardless of the tool used, software engineers using that tool have to do a lot of lifting to get the tool to work. It's not a question of whether react is better than backbone or vise versa, it's a question of whether we software engineers, as a group, are emphasizing the correct compromises, and what takeaways we can make from examining the compromises of today's popular tools.

Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025

#155

Post by tefkah » Sat, Oct 25, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

> These aren't edge cases. They're normal problems you hit building moderately complex apps

These aren’t real articles. They’re slopg diatribes generated by people who can’t even be bothered to communicate a thought.

I feel annoying for being this guy, but i think someone should point out the fact that it’s barely written by a human being. What’s the point in engaging with the point the “author” is trying to make when the author is Claude?

Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025

#156

Post by tefkah » Sat, Oct 25, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

ggregoire wrote: post #137

This illustrates greatly why React got so popular. If you look at the React code, it's 99% "just" JavaScript and HTML. The only proprietary function is `useState`, and even the people who have never touched React probably understand what `useState` does in this code without having to open the docs. Also, in the Backbone code, half of the application relies on the string selector `.space-y-2`. So if someone in your te…

because they barely wrote the article, they just asked Claude to write a blog post

Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025

#157

Post by kdazzle » Sat, Oct 25, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

diegof79 wrote: post #150

smrtinsert wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a world of options away from React today that have those features. We can't pretend only React has them.

Agree, but the article was about comparing React and Backbone. There are a gazillion of options that resolve the same problems: Vue, Svelte, Solid, Lit, etc. Backbone was born as better code organization on top of jQuery and CoffeeScript. It never attempted to solve these issues.

I think Backbone was a bit before Coffeescript.

Haha, coffeescript was so hot for a minute

Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025

#158

Post by hollowturtle » Sat, Oct 25, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

As long as React was the "View" and was marketed as such, being able to express declaratively what ui should render given a combination of state+props, it was great. Then... i don't now what happened with hooks sprecifically, but i still have hard time figuring out why they were needed other than making everything looks "more functional" I often read something like algebraic data types, I was astonished. React.createClass was all we needed, and some optimizations from there was possible. Today they market themselves as "don't use React without a framework" it's stupid

Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025

#159

Post by flufluflufluffy » Sat, Oct 25, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

ysavir wrote: post #154

diegof79 wrote: post #134

I worked with Backbone, Angular 1, Ember, and then React. The article overlooks the problems that made React popular: - Composition: Composing components is easier and more efficient in React. Backbone’s render function assumes "this.$el" is mounted and available in the DOM. That makes composition difficult: you cannot simply nest one component inside another without managing the DOM lifecycle of subcomponents. You d…

That's all true, but I think the article's point still stands: React trades one set of compromises for another, and regardless of the tool used, software engineers using that tool have to do a lot of lifting to get the tool to work. It's not a question of whether react is better than backbone or vise versa, it's a question of whether we software engineers, as a group, are emphasizing the correct compromises, and what…

Which is the case for every library ever written

Re: React vs. Backbone in 2025

#160

Post by tefkah » Sat, Oct 25, 2025, 4:39 PM UTC

preommr wrote: post #13

??? I 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 com…

It’s just slop, not worth engaging with this article