React and Redux are a joke right? • Hacker News Board

Re: React and Redux are a joke right?

#101

Post by ryanlaws » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 3:43 PM UTC

joncampbelldev wrote: post #96

ryanlaws wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to get into ClojureScript a few months ago, intrigued by the tree-shaking of the Closure Compiler. I was thoroughly disappointed when my compiled hello-world yielded compiled code in the neighborhood of 70k. Surely I configured something poorly or didn't install the right leinegen packages, but coming from webpack this is a pretty discouraging out-of-the-box experience. It seems there's some minimum (thi…

There certainly is a minimum, especially when bringing in another language entirely. The point of the google closure compiler, with advanced opts, tree shaking etc etc is that the size will grow slowly as you add hundreds of your own source files and dozens of 3rd party libraries. Choosing libraries shouldn't require careful examination of their output file size, especially if you only want half the functionality.

Are you implying then that the Closure Compiler mitigates or even eliminates the need to carefully examine the output sizes because of its optimization capabilities? If so, that's great, but I do remain skeptical about this, based partly on my experience described above. I don't mean this in a sarcastic or dismissive way but I was expecting to see something along the lines of:

console.log("Hello world!")

I realize this is a silly example for such a powerful tool but I just wanted to quickly get a feel for what the compiler is capable of before I committed a whole lot of time to learning the language. All I got out of the exercise was that the compiler creates a much larger minimum package size than I'd hoped. I'd appreciate any suggestions on a better way of proving its value for the cautiously curious. The language itself seems great, as does the community.

Perhaps it's just a different paradigm from npm/webpack, e.g. utilizing a rich built-in library rather than, yeah, carefully grocery-shopping for only the components you need? I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other but it does intuitively seem that choosy shopping will tend to yield a smaller package size, at least for small-to-medium applications.

Re: React and Redux are a joke right?

#102

Post by Nekorosu » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 3:52 PM UTC

coding123 wrote: post #93

Nekorosu wrote: post #89

Somehow author jumps from the problem of convenient data structures updating and immutability to Redux which solves a different problem. There are several things about React, Redux and React based tech stacks: 1. React requires knowledge of basics of functional programming React looks like it's easy to pick up but if you don't know or want to learn at least basics of functional programming then it's not for you. With…

I completely agree here. and I think if most people followed these last 3 lines, there might be what, 6 projects using React? I find the highlighted article on Facebook's "reason" for inventing Flux/Redux very laughable. - This message unread indicator kept saying (1). And how it went away with bug fixes and came back... Did they ever stop to realize they just had some really bad devs working on the chat app? Any re-…

Much more than six projects for sure. Nice pun though. I started using React before the hype train. I couldn't care less about Facebook's reasons but I enjoy the fact they somehow built a library which is a good fit for some of my projects.

I don't like Redux that much. All React based frameworks I like are not even written in JavaScript.

Re: React and Redux are a joke right?

#103

Post by menckenjr » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 4:03 PM UTC

joncampbelldev wrote: post #31

mariusandra wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

60k is a big issue if your users are on older smartphones. I'm tired of people equating the time it takes to download an image in the background with the render blocking cpu-crunching parsing that javascript requires.

Like the 966k of JS on your homepage? ;) There are several things to consider with download time: - is this a website? why on earth do you need react or anything for a website? - is this a single page web application? then to develop with a medium sized team and an increasing feature set its nice to pick a language and library/framework that enable that. - do you really care about mobile users performance and bandwid…

Your point about the need for a native app is going to raise hackles on web devs who want to "do mobile development" without paying their dues by learning the platform.

Re: React and Redux are a joke right?

#104

Post by hungerstrike » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 4:31 PM UTC

davidmurdoch wrote: post #14

I started working on a react native+redux project myself recently (after working with react on its own for about 1 year) and have been feeling the same way. And we've just been working on auth, data persistence, and screen navigation. My problem with it is that there is so much abstraction that almost no prior knowledge from using other frameworks or libraries is useful. It seems like everything is magic. Here is a c…

This is exactly my experience. Eventually, I skipped redux/mobx/etc altogether by creating a singleton EventEmitter which can hold application state objects, emit events when the state changes and persist it to SQLite. For data that does not need to be in memory, I just access SQLite directly (and I can still use my appState singleton to let the rest of the app know when SQLite data has changed.)

Yesterday I spent probably 5-6 hours just trying to figure out how to navigate easily with react-navigation. There are probably over 100 questions on their issue list asking the same thing: How do you easily navigate between nested navigators? They all have the same setup: A StackNavigator that contains a TabNavigator that contains one or more StackNavigators. Nobody knows how to do it without redux and users that do use redux have other complaints. The react-navigation examples all show a `path:` property, but they don't just have a global service that you can use to navigate to all those paths. Instead (I think) you have to wrap all of your navigators and pass around the `navigation` property. When I tried following their example of passing down the navigation property, I just get errors.

I blame the people who tried to force their stupid functional programming ideology onto the whole framework.

Re: React and Redux are a joke right?

#105

Post by pushcx » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 4:44 PM UTC

This example doesn’t fit with the React style I’ve seen before, where state is rarely used. This data isn’t flowing (https://lobste.rs/s/ptfoib/yes_react_is_taking_over_front_en...) like I’ve come to expect, but one of my biggest gripes with React is that the docs are no longer very good because they haven’t been comprehensively rewritten for the current design and because the only sentence in the docs to address the crucial distinction between props and state is the distinctly unhelpful:

> If you imagine a component tree as a waterfall of props, each component’s state is like an additional water source that joins it at an arbitrary point but also flows down.

In this post’s example, I would expect to see a component for an individual Person with the props name and location, then a People component storing the ordered list in props. If the app does a lot of this general “maintain a sorted list with random insertions from over the net”, People would be wrapped by a higher-order component (https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/higher-order-component...) managing that. Otherwise there’d probably be a page-level custom component or just random stateful javascript pulling in the data and passing it down to People for rerendering. (I don’t know Redux to address the second half of his example.)

It’s ironic that the author advocates for immediate mode GUIs, because normal React looks and works like an immediate mode GUI with memoization. A component is a function responsible for part of the page. Its props are the input to the function and it returns a render of part of the page (possibly by rendering more memoized components). The cache is busted when props changes. There’s also a hack to be used sparingly called state so that small bits of UI state can be managed at a low-level instead of in their parent component.

Re: React and Redux are a joke right?

#106

Post by threatofrain » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 5:22 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #66

neya wrote: post #58

I'm one of the laggards - Over the years, based on staying around tech communities (esp. HN) I've learned not to invest time / effort into the hype that surrounds a newly launched tech. I did burn my finger a couple of times, especially with MongoDB back then, so these days I'm pretty cautious. I'm one of the very few who didn't invest in React. I waited it out and invested into Vue.JS, instead. This is no framework…

> ~15 years trying to make everyone separate HTML, JS & CSS. And then suddenly everything went south and we’re writing code like this: That's definitely not what's bad about React. In fact that's what great about React -- coherent widgets (components) that are defined in a single place. Not to mention that JSX in React it's all JS and properly parsed and checked -- the "HTML" there is just sugar. Such separation of H…

I'd argue that back then, focusing on elegant CSS was also a mistake. Outside of well-done libraries, I've never really perceived code re-use as a big force multiplier.

Even now with React, I still don't see much code re-use outside of libraries. When you want your code to be re-used... you exercise the discipline that a library author would. You add typings, you add documentation, you add tests, you create a Github page where people can provide info. Taking someone else's code is a commitment, so you at least want the reassurance of library-quality code.

Otherwise when you write a component, whether in the old school html/css/js split, or in React, you're unlikely to write the component in a way that optimizes for generality, and optimizing for generality, as opposed to the narrow business case in front of you, is often a lot harder.

Re: React and Redux are a joke right?

#107

Post by christophilus » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 6:32 PM UTC

ryanlaws wrote: post #101

joncampbelldev wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There certainly is a minimum, especially when bringing in another language entirely. The point of the google closure compiler, with advanced opts, tree shaking etc etc is that the size will grow slowly as you add hundreds of your own source files and dozens of 3rd party libraries. Choosing libraries shouldn't require careful examination of their output file size, especially if you only want half the functionality.

Are you implying then that the Closure Compiler mitigates or even eliminates the need to carefully examine the output sizes because of its optimization capabilities? If so, that's great, but I do remain skeptical about this, based partly on my experience described above. I don't mean this in a sarcastic or dismissive way but I was expecting to see something along the lines of: console.log("Hello world!") I realize th…

Clojurescript's bundle size for real world apps is decent, especially given the power it provides. If all you're doing is a 3 line JavaScript, Clojurescript won't benefit you. But if you're writing a complex application,it will beat or match your typical JS stack in terms of code size.

I suggest watching this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gsffg5xxFQI

Re: React and Redux are a joke right?

#108

Post by shafyy » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 7:03 PM UTC

I agree that there is some amount of boiler plate code to Redux that doesn't seem to make sense and takes a long time to do when you're new. But I think it really helps with maintenance and scalability of projects down the road and saves you time later on.

Of course, as others have said, React and Redux is not a panacea - depending on what you want to achieve and on your personal preferences there might be better tools.

Re: React and Redux are a joke right?

#109

Post by ryanbrunner » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 8:45 PM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #43

ryanbrunner wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think sometimes you need an outsider view to call out that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes, and that's going to result in botched details. I don't think it impacts the overall point the author is trying to make. I teach web development at a part-time course, and we recently redesigned our curriculum to use React + Node instead of Rails with JQuery. With the new technologies, the students are profoundly less p…

Has the complexity mostly come from React or from Node? I'm doing a small Node library from a similar but casual teaching perspective (all those manual middleware should be there by default IMO) so I'm quite interested in leaning your Node.js pain points.

Node (well Express) is not a problem at all, save maybe authentication and database concepts (which are a slog no matter what language you're working with for new developers). I think Express is actually more suited in some ways for complete beginners than Rails is.

Re: React and Redux are a joke right?

#110

Post by hex13 » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 9:26 PM UTC

shafyy wrote: post #108

I agree that there is some amount of boiler plate code to Redux that doesn't seem to make sense and takes a long time to do when you're new. But I think it really helps with maintenance and scalability of projects down the road and saves you time later on. Of course, as others have said, React and Redux is not a panacea - depending on what you want to achieve and on your personal preferences there might be better too…

> I think it really helps with maintenance and scalability of

> projects down the road and saves you time later on.

It's popular argument but I don't think it's completely correct.

On the one hand principles of Redux (immutability, message-passing approach, separation model from the view) can be helpful, on the other hand huge amount of boilerplate and moving parts can only spoil scalability.

Besides Redux is very low level with very little abstraction (this is why some many abstractions over Redux appear - because Redux alone has almost none).

I think Redux has good foundations but it's poorly designed as a library targeted to average developer working on real projects. It feels more like some academic experiment, something more like proof-of-concept that library that solves real problems in elegant way.