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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

#181

Post by epolanski »

interstice wrote: post #148
epolanski wrote: post #138

Imho react is to FE development what C++ is to games programming. And I'm not saying this in a good sense. In particular their developers demonstrate the same tendencies: - unwillingness to leave behind all the years of experiences they've built on it. I'm not saying one should just for the sake of changing, but if you encounter certain problems, you should at least consider it - unwillingness to really try more mode…

I remember vividly the chaos before React and what it was like to not know whether it was worth investing in a framework because it might not be around for long. Vue was the first one that I stuck with for a while, but Nuxt was being updated slowly at the time and none of the packages ever seemed quite as seamless as the guys in React land had it. I don't even use more than a handful of unique packages per site gener…

> Being able to render 100k table line updates simultaneously instead of 10k or whatever isn't fundamentally going to make the difference for all of those other requirements.

React's performance are way more severe and ubiquitous and user impacting.

I'd really love to see the websites you're writing in React and lunch a lighthouse or to simulate how do they perform for somebody on a slightly slower connection or not being on the latest iPhone.

Because I know my users include bank clerks or post office cashiers on 10+ year old computers being used at work as much as people on vacation with very poor signal on the beach.

Of course, if you only experience your website from your MBP on cable you thing the issues are only at "10k rows" level.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#182

Post by rickcarlino »

There are certainly good reasons to be concerned about a front end monoculture, and what follows is a curious observation rather than an attempt to discount the points being made here. Ten years ago, we had the opposite of a monoculture. We had new frameworks hitting the front pages of HN every week. We had the shitshow that was Angular 1.x -> 2.0. We had people inventing terms like JavaScript fatigue to express the pain of being a frontend dev at the time. The dust has finally settled and React has undeniably won. I am still kind of groggy from the whole thing and am going to avoid learning web components until it hurts my career to avoid it. I am not singing the praises of React (I don’t like hooks and my opinions really don’t matter), but I am at least happy that it is not 2015 any more and I can focus on building. It is interesting to me that enough time has passed and the sentiment is slowly changing.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#185

Post by jongjong »

spankalee wrote: post #157

Web components are the way out of this trap. Every single framework that isn't React should be wholeheartedly supporting web components to make sure that they have access to a viable ecosystem of components and utilities without having to bootstrap an entire competitor to React and it's ecosystem. While a lot of people view web components as competitors to frameworks, they don't really have to be. The just define an…

Agreed, Web Components don't require any framework and you can achieve everything you can achieve with React (including reactivity via attributeChangedCallback), the learning curve for Web Components is actually much less steep than React when you consider from the perspective of someone starting from scratch.

Furthermore, Web Components enforce good patterns; like the fact that you can only pass strings as attributes (by-value) is actually genius as it encourages simple, minimalist component interfaces and avoids pass-by-reference issues for which React community had to invent an entirely new paradigm to protect against (I.e. Redux state management with functional programming approach).

And the great irony is that a lot of the top people who are still pushing React are basically rich from Facebook shares and don't have to work anymore. In effect many of them are forcing this technology onto young people who have no choice in the matter whilst they themselves don't need to use it or do any coding anymore. Meanwhile I know a lot of developers who want to leave (or have left) the industry because of how bad it is and how few decisions they're allowed to make.

It's demoralizing to work with inferior tools when you know better tools exist because you use them in side projects... When you see this, you think to yourself "If the company forces me to be inefficient with my choice of tooling, this gives me a license to be inefficient in other ways."

Personally, I don't even code anymore (only on my side projects). It's a shame because one of my main talents is writing clean, minimalist code. In my day job, I'm using drag-and-drop UI platforms like n8n and Flowise (for AI). It's refreshing to be able to use vanilla JS inside the nodes, without a compile step and on a real-world project that actually pays. These UI platforms are actually much more predictable to work with than React. When I was using React (for almost a decade), I was constantly debugging weird glitches and state management issues; I never encountered those with Web Components or with platforms like n8n.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#186

Post by ChadNauseam »

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #92
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…

I think part of the problem is that browsers don't really serve their original purpose anymore. Google functionally controls just enough of a monopoly via chrome that they can generally do whatever they want (and not do whatever they don't want to do). So that standards still mostly can't do anything google isn't enthusiastic about dumping dev time into. And they're just barely not enough of a monopoly that they can'…

> Google functionally controls just enough of a monopoly via chrome that they can generally do whatever they want

Crazy statement. Any API not supported by Safari might as well not exist.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#188

Post by andrewmcwatters »

spankalee wrote: post #157

Web components are the way out of this trap. Every single framework that isn't React should be wholeheartedly supporting web components to make sure that they have access to a viable ecosystem of components and utilities without having to bootstrap an entire competitor to React and it's ecosystem. While a lot of people view web components as competitors to frameworks, they don't really have to be. The just define an…

I moved my entire business off React and now I don’t have to worry about tinkerers at Meta deciding to reinvent React every 2 years and tricking everyone by keeping the name again and again.

Web components are fantastic. They are the real future.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#189

Post by cheesekunator »

ForHackernews wrote: post #151
giveita wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe us backenders help. If I need to do front end I learn as little as possible. React does the job. It could have been Angular that ended up being in the boring throne, and I would have said just use Angular. Just use what the world uses!

Angular is so much nicer and more batteries-included than React. React somehow manages to be massively yet incomplete: add a router, add state management, add react-hook-form...

This is very true and almost nobody sees it...
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