131–140 of 301 posts
I am not so up to date with frontend dev but what's with the hate towards React these days? It still does what it's supposed to do very well and very fast. Yeah sure if you want JSX you need transpilation but I would want that anyway if I want any of the ES6 features without losing browser compatibility. And it's also constantly evolving and getting better. Just recently I started a React project with class component…
I am not so up to date with frontend dev but what's with the hate towards React these days? It still does what it's supposed to do very well and very fast. Yeah sure if you want JSX you need transpilation but I would want that anyway if I want any of the ES6 features without losing browser compatibility. And it's also constantly evolving and getting better. Just recently I started a React project with class component…
It’s the price of success. Similarly, a lot of people now vehemently hate Go, and in a few years they’ll be complaining about the problems with Rust. (No idea about frontend because as far as I’m concerned React is still on top.) I don’t think it’s really too big of a deal, but I wish people would be more realistic and use less hyperbole. Everything has trade-offs, one’s own personal honey moon ending does not mean w…
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This is that moment that proves we’ve made no progress on desktop. In 1990s we had Borland Delphi and CBuilder, in 2000s we had .Net and Qt, now this? How on Earth this is better?
Could you explain why, in terms of the reasons for react I gave in my previous comments, any of your suggestions are better than react?
1. UX
SPAs do not offer native user experience and it's generally harder to provide it on all platforms at once, even with solutions like Cordova or React Native. Usability and accessibility requirements differ, interaction patterns differ, and sometimes you have to produce completely different designs on desktop and small touchscreen devices. On desktop specifically there's a rich history of rapid application development tools and UI frameworks aligned very well with platform guidelines and design patterns. Native development on mobile still beats everything else when it concerns UX.
2. Development
The development cost for browser-based apps and React specifically is definitely one of the lowest, due to popularity of this technology and availability of the tools. RAD and technologies like JavaFX can be inexpensive only if you already have the team familiar with the stack.
The development speed of RAD tools was and still is impressive when it concerns UI. The interactive prototype of a screen created in 15 minutes in a visual tool IS the application that can run. All you need to know as a developer, is the component library and programming language. I do not really see, how React could be better here. One big advantage of browser-based apps is ability to develop both for desktop and mobile platforms at once, but this has UX consequences (see above).
The architecture of native or imperative-style frameworks is generally better than of any of JS solutions. JS ecosystem tends to reinvent the wheel by gradually introducing best practices which are pretty standard everywhere else for decades. E.g. it took some time to build Redux, which is quite similar to the UI event dispatching mechanisms in Java and the like, but uses its own unique terminology - reducers, stores etc - for what is actually a combination of classic design patterns like Observer.
3. Deployment and support
One major benefit of SPAs is instant delivery of new version to all users, achieved by design, but the SPAs packaged in desktop wrappers do not even have this benefit. Also, is mitigated by the existing approaches on distribution of standalone desktop apps via update infrastructure (which also allow canary deployments).
One of the rarely visible costs of WebView apps is the resource consumption on the client, which is usually ignored by the developers of online services. Browser engines are not the most efficient VMs for running application code and they require A LOT of RAM. Just compare Slack and mIRC - similar chat functionality (Slack may have better support for rich content and integrations), but how different they are in utilization of resources!
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Let’s put it straight: HTML is a Hypertext Markup Language by definition, it’s not an application UI markup language. We are living in a very confused world where inappropriate standard is used just because nothing better got sufficiently big market share. ES, TS, CSS, all the libraries and frameworks in the ecosystem are all just attempts to make the whale fly. For last 20 years we should have been focusing on build…
It would be a strange choice to not use the best tool for the job because one of the acronyms that’s related to that tool stands for something that for historical reasons doesn’t precisely describe the job.
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> I am not so up to date with frontend dev but what's with the hate towards React these days? HN is rarely the place to read constructive comments about JavaScript and frontend development. Personally I've been developing web apps for 10 years (with technologies such as Spring, ASP.NET, CakePHP, Symfony, Django, jQuery, Backbone.js, Angular 1) and I quite enjoy React. I think it makes my job easier and I feel product…
What's a good place for front-end dev discussions, especially the type which are more on the meta-level?
I am not so up to date with frontend dev but what's with the hate towards React these days? It still does what it's supposed to do very well and very fast. Yeah sure if you want JSX you need transpilation but I would want that anyway if I want any of the ES6 features without losing browser compatibility. And it's also constantly evolving and getting better. Just recently I started a React project with class component…
> I am not so up to date with frontend dev but what's with the hate towards React these days? HN is rarely the place to read constructive comments about JavaScript and frontend development. Personally I've been developing web apps for 10 years (with technologies such as Spring, ASP.NET, CakePHP, Symfony, Django, jQuery, Backbone.js, Angular 1) and I quite enjoy React. I think it makes my job easier and I feel product…
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Hooks are just a dirty hack, but sold very well. Internally in React the state of a hook is being kept and updated when you call the set function, kinda similar to vtables and context in OOP. There is no other way to do this AFAIK. It only mimics functional programming, and that's why you see the restrictions about hooks, you cannot use them outside React, cannot nest, etc.. What's maybe the most stupid thing about h…
const is for assuring that the variable is never reassigned. It's not for assuring that variable cannot change. const is not "constant". In any case, in the useState hooks, if the value is changed via the set function, the component will be diffed and re-rendered. There is no value change happening while it is running in that scope.
Please tell me how you'd change a to 1 in this example:
const a = 0;Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hooks are just a dirty hack, but sold very well. Internally in React the state of a hook is being kept and updated when you call the set function, kinda similar to vtables and context in OOP. There is no other way to do this AFAIK. It only mimics functional programming, and that's why you see the restrictions about hooks, you cannot use them outside React, cannot nest, etc.. What's maybe the most stupid thing about h…
Wow, posts like these provide real counterweight to my desire to write open source software.
(Opinionated post ahead...) React is, imo, garbage, but alas it's here to stay -- you know, kind of like Spring or Swing. In 10 years we're going to be wondering how the hell we ever used React 8 hours a day way back then. These kinds of markup frameworks/libraries were touted as jQuery's successor, but, from an architectural point of view, jQuery is by far their superior. "Everything an HTML tag" is an insane mantra…
> "Everything an HTML tag" is an insane mantra to have. I don't think this is a React mantra at all. Maybe "everything is a function" would be a modern React mantra? Seeing how React code is mostly hooks and components, and both are nowadays generally written as functions. JSX is not even required when writing React, by the way. It's just syntactic sugar. > It's crazy to me that it's normal now to have like 3-4 compi…
Everyone keeps repeating this, but looking at a pile of 'createElement' calls is so much harder to read than just looking at a page of html.