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React is winning by default and slowing innovation

lorenstew.art

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Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#161

Post by sfn42 »

j45 wrote: post #90
tshaddox wrote: post #87

This is mostly just a complaint about how good React is. It's so good that it's difficult for the technical benefits of alternatives to outweigh the social benefits of choosing React. Note that this is neither a major compliment to React's technical merits nor a criticism of React's competitors. In fact, I don't even disagree with the author on some of his claims, such as: > React is no longer winning by technical me…

React is great at solving complex problems. Not all problems are complex to begin with, and having a complex tool as default otherwise adds complexity to the project and also inflexibility to iterate quickly. This is in addition to having to maintain a relatively brittle ecosystem from past feature as well as future features but that can be true for more than one area of JavaScript or other technologies. Looking for…

React is totally fine for solving simple problems.

I'd classify pretty much all frontend web development I do as simple. It's pretty much just boring internal websites, I definitely don't need react for them. Could have made the same thing with any other frontend framework, could have made it server-side rendered. React is totally fine for that. The backend is generally more exciting than the frontend. React is totally fine.

The main problem I see is that most other developers are really ass at their jobs and just overcomplicate everything. I've seen very simple apps have a super complex React codebase, and due to the complexity they're always full of bugs. It's much more rare that I see an elegantly simple React app, or any other app for that matter. Everyone just always overcomplicates everything.

Using React doesn't in any way require you to make it complex. You can make React apps dead simple. And if you are comfortable working with react you'll already know all the solutions to all the problems which makes your job extremely easy. You can breeze through and make the entire simple app in a few days if you know what you're doing. Or you can pick up some new fancy tool, hey let's try Svelte. And now instead of a few days we're gonna spend a few weeks and end up with a codebase that reflects our Svelte experience. And hey look it's time to onboard a new team member - hey guy, we have these three apps - this one's made with Angular because one dimwit wanted to learn that, here's a Svelte app we made last year and lastly here's a HTMX app we made when that was hot. Good luck learning 3 new technologies you'll probably never use again!

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#162

Post by dgfitz »

AlexErrant wrote: post #145
apsurd wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 React DX is really great. It started really great and it got weird and bloated but it's still really great relative to the JS landscape hell. But, also yes, it's a pain in the ass and a frustrating kind of necessary evil. So there is room for improvements. Nextjs is a living hell. The ironic thing is AI makes it dramatically more tolerable to the point it's actually pretty good. But that can't be a good thing in t…

React DX is hot garbage. Words cannot express how much I LOATHE hook rules. Coming from a Solid JS background, where reactive primitives are just Javascript functions... I groan every single time I run into (yet another) hook rule. I have to conditionally render empty fragments because React can't handle conditional hooks. It's the stupidest thing ever. "Oh hey let me allocate memory for this hook that will almost ce…

I read things like this and think “I am so glad I don’t write JavaScript/ web-anything for a living”

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#164

Post by 827a »

apsurd wrote: post #112
827a wrote: post #102

React is winning because its really good. Even if the cost is an extra few milliseconds of render time and few extra hours of dev time figuring out things like hook dependencies. If React starts taking a backseat, it'll be because its no longer really good. And, to be fair: I've started to see this happen. Next & Vercel have totally taken over the React world, and they've proven to make quite poor architectural decis…

+1 React DX is really great. It started really great and it got weird and bloated but it's still really great relative to the JS landscape hell. But, also yes, it's a pain in the ass and a frustrating kind of necessary evil. So there is room for improvements. Nextjs is a living hell. The ironic thing is AI makes it dramatically more tolerable to the point it's actually pretty good. But that can't be a good thing in t…

Next initially jumped the shark when they went all-in on server-side rendering. The reason why Vercel did this is clear: client-side rendered apps can be hosted basically for free on Firebase, Cloudflare, or S3, so the only way they can raise their Vercel cloud revenue is by forcing their users into a dynamic-first world, pushing so much complexity and dynamism into the framework that only Vercel could disentangle how to host it effectively. The less-dystopic reasons they communicated as to why customers might want SSR; improved time-to-first-byte and a more PHP/Rails-like programming model; while well-intentioned, ultimately became of questionable value to customers given their choices during implementation.

I do actually believe a more PHP/Rails-like programming model would be beneficial for React; Vercel just missed the extremely important detail in how Rails is so dang productive. Its not their decisions when it comes to HTML templating; its Active Record.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#165

Post by ggregoryarms »

mhitza wrote: post #83

The javascript people should stop innovating for a couple of years. To much innovation that lead nowhere. How many ways can one build a web javascript project? Browser people should pick up slack and start developing sane components for the web. How about a backend-supporting combobox, or a standardized date picker across browsers? Then we wouldn't need to constantly innovate how we manage the state of those fundamen…

To be fair browsers/CSS have been solving a lot of use cases you'd normally turn to js for, lately. We should continue escalating this effort.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#166

Post by byteCoder »

latchkey wrote: post #125
sapiogram wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Vercel doing to React? I just know them as a simple hosting solution.

At least in my own experience, I tried building a relatively simple static SPA NextJS React app with their router, and wanted to host it on CloudFlare Pages. It ran locally in dev mode just fine. Once I deployed it on CFP, the router broke. No errors in the console, it just didn't work. If I'm forced to use Vercel to make a simple SPA work, which then forced me into paying for their service, that's the problem.

OpenNext on Cloudflare is the only way I've successfully gotten NextJS to work in a Cloudflare Worker.

https://opennext.js.org/cloudflare

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#168

Post by thinkxl »

827a wrote: post #102

React is winning because its really good. Even if the cost is an extra few milliseconds of render time and few extra hours of dev time figuring out things like hook dependencies. If React starts taking a backseat, it'll be because its no longer really good. And, to be fair: I've started to see this happen. Next & Vercel have totally taken over the React world, and they've proven to make quite poor architectural decis…

If React implodes because of bad architectural decisions, Vite should fork it.

It's crazy that the best React DX is provided through Vue's community projects.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#169

Post by oofbey »

ipaddr wrote: post #120
johnfn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is probably the wrongest statement. When React was launched, it was one in a pool of thousands of web frameworks. For any axis you want to claim that React won by "default", there was another framework that dominated React in that axis and lost anyways. Some frameworks had more resources and lost (Angular), some of which were more popular and lost (jQuery, Backbone), and some of which were even more hyped t…

It won by marketing and the angularjs to Angular breaking change. If they kept going with angularjs or had an upgrade path react wouldn't be default in the enterprise stack. That's all on Google. Meteor was node framework. jQuery is probably still more popular but it is only a lib. Vue had a Chinese language problem. React won because a framework by Facebook felt safe.

Google's incapable of sticking to anything good. Nobody gets promoted at Google maintaining a system. So somebody inevitably gets the idea to make a 2.0 which isn't backwards compatible, enabling them to do all sorts of bold promotion-worthy innovation. And inevitably 2.0 isn't very good. Even worse, it makes the entire ecosystem confusing and unhealthy.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#170

Post by solarkraft »

wk_end wrote: post #116
j45 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React is great at solving complex problems. Not all problems are complex to begin with, and having a complex tool as default otherwise adds complexity to the project and also inflexibility to iterate quickly. This is in addition to having to maintain a relatively brittle ecosystem from past feature as well as future features but that can be true for more than one area of JavaScript or other technologies. Looking for…

I think (at least part of) the reason why React has been so successful is that is scales so well: it's actually a relatively simple tool that works well for small problems. Pair it with a Vite template or something and you can be up-and-running in minutes. But it continues working pretty well as your app gets bigger, too. But where React fails is actually in more complex scenarios. Prop drilling becomes tedious or in…

The amazing thing about React to me is that millions of dollars keep flowing into improving its DX further. They have spent a lot of time building React Compiler (https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler/introduction) which does all the memoization for you! This severely lightens the performance concerns.
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