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Does anybody like React?

jsx.lol

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Re: Does anybody like React?

#21

Post by shimman »

Been using React before class components was a thing, it had its place in the sun but I truly believe react has now done more harm in holding the frontend community back than helping it.

It also doesn't help that every single react codebase will always be drastically different from one another. In fact the easiest way to know the date of a react project are the dependencies one chooses in package.json. IDK if that's good or bad, but when you see bootstrap + sass in ${current_year} it's not going to be a good time. Compare this to something like Go where most projects are quite similar. Never had issues jumping in completely new Go repos but react projects are always a massive gamble toward always sucking.

No solutions from me, I charge a premium working on react and there is no shortage of clients with garbage react projects needing help but can't imagine the waste of pure human effort put into maintaining such projects to begin with.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#22

Post by imperio59 »

petcat wrote: post #13
moojacob wrote: post #8

I like React. And I have seriously tried the HTMX/Hotwire camp. I wanted to make a back button use browser APIs to go back if the coming from the inbox, just link to the inbox otherwise to preserve scrolling. I had to wire the actions from the html to call the function that goes back, then in my controller determine the previous page and send the JS enabled back button or the hard link. My logic was spread out over 3…

> I wanted to make a back button use browser APIs to go back if the coming from the inbox, just link to the inbox otherwise to preserve scrolling. I had to wire the actions from the html to call the function that goes back, then in my controller determine the previous page and send the JS enabled back button or the hard link. This is why I hate react spas. They're always trying to find some stupid way to break my bro…

This has been a non issue when using proper routing libraries that push history entries on the stack properly and render routes from the top of the component tree down.

You hate BAD react SPAs that break the fundamentals of how the web works. Good ones take care to not do that.

React fundamentally doesn't cause this issue either. You can use a different framework than react or even vanilla JS and still produce the same bugs.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#26

Post by veryfancy »

fishtoaster wrote: post #15

As someone who lived through all major waves of JS for the last ~16 years, I do love react, in a sense: React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried. I'd take React over the Angular 1 days any time. I'd take Angular 1's full-bodied MVC over the "build it yourself from scratch every time" approach of Backbone. I'd take Backbone's minimal MVC structure over the classic JQuery Soup architecture.…

Chesterton’s framework.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#28

Post by shelled »

I am assuming the idea is to talk about "react" pattern/idea as well, not just that JS framework, and no, I didn't read the article - after two quotes, I scrolled and realised there was no article to read.

For me, coding is feeling intuitive as a human being even when I am writing code for the computers (but also for other human beings who'll read and work on my code; not sure how much would that be post-LLM world but still...). React never felt intuitive or, say, natural to me. It "feels" upside down to me, a bit anachronistic (in some way). But as I have seen with many frameworks, or rather "paradigms", which become fashion in the end, "the tools in vogue" because that's what the largest population of coders use, this is what one usually has to use now. I was quite sad when I saw Jetpack Compose as an Android dev. Technically it had improvements over the XMLs no doubt but then seeing it was React was quite not great (at least not for me). But this is what it and one just deals with.

I wish the coding world wasn't obsessed with patterns, architectures, and the need to fit everything into something concretely established (or in vogue). I often see Frankensteins as results.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#29

Post by skydhash »

fishtoaster wrote: post #15

As someone who lived through all major waves of JS for the last ~16 years, I do love react, in a sense: React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried. I'd take React over the Angular 1 days any time. I'd take Angular 1's full-bodied MVC over the "build it yourself from scratch every time" approach of Backbone. I'd take Backbone's minimal MVC structure over the classic JQuery Soup architecture.…

> React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried.

> React has its tradeoffs, but we got here after a long slog of other things that don't work.

I strongly believe it's because of trying to achieve the wrong goal with the wrong tool. So many websites could just be bare html pages and forms with just a sprinkle of JS for some interactivity, but they want to add JS for whatever reason.

If you can have a complete repo browser without JS (cgit), most web applications can survive without it too.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#30

Post by wg0 »

fishtoaster wrote: post #15

As someone who lived through all major waves of JS for the last ~16 years, I do love react, in a sense: React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried. I'd take React over the Angular 1 days any time. I'd take Angular 1's full-bodied MVC over the "build it yourself from scratch every time" approach of Backbone. I'd take Backbone's minimal MVC structure over the classic JQuery Soup architecture.…

I was a big Sevelte fan. After writing a sizeable application in Sevelte I realized that React is superior in every way overall speaking and at least you're writing 100% pure JavaScript directly. Or Typescript.

Plus the ecosystem. It's huge. Nothing comes closer.

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