Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Critique of React Hooks

dillonshook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 298 posts

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#191

Post by shoulderfake »

stevebmark wrote: post #149
vosper wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I look back on all our HOCs and function as children and shudder compared to how easy it is with hooks. If by "function as children" you're referring to render props, personally I was really happy to see that short-lived fad die out. I don't think render props made things simpler. Now if we can admit we never needed Sagas just to do some data fetching maybe we can burn that stalled-out old bandwagon, too :D (Sagas…

I have never fundamentally understood sagas and I've tried a few times. I'm able to wrap my head around redux-loop though https://github.com/redux-loop/redux-loop

They're just redux middleware implemented with generators, so you can do some nifty things with it if your use case requires. I've used sagas on a several projects and they all actually did need that type of tool but I've chosen thunks on other projects when fetching logic was simple.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#192

Post by ng12 »

desc wrote: post #156

I'm going to express something a lot of people are thinking and are being far too diplomatic about. React Hooks are a fucking stupid idea and always were. They're basically just adding dynamic scoping to a language and framework which doesn't need it, in one of the most 'magical' and confusing ways possible. You have to care about execution order to understand exactly how they'll all work and that will bite you event…

I don't really understand this. Can you explain how hooks relate to dynamic scoping?

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#193

Post by schwartzworld »

mstudio wrote: post #19

I have some similar gripes. I find Hooks to save a bit of coding overall. I've found my functional components to be about 10-20% smaller than my class components. I'm not 100% convinced it's really worth it, though. With class components, my state/props are clearly defined within the constructor and/or PropTypes. This makes it easy to understand the overall architecture of a component. Functional components with Hook…

That's a misuse of useEffect.

it's much simpler to wrap the set function and just call your other function afterward like this:

``` const handleChange = (value) => { setMyState(value); doSomething(); } ```

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#194

Post by nickbauman »

desc wrote: post #156

I'm going to express something a lot of people are thinking and are being far too diplomatic about. React Hooks are a fucking stupid idea and always were. They're basically just adding dynamic scoping to a language and framework which doesn't need it, in one of the most 'magical' and confusing ways possible. You have to care about execution order to understand exactly how they'll all work and that will bite you event…

Absolutely 100% agree; Reactive programming environments become easily unmanageable unless they are Functional Reactive Programming for the exact reason you state. Hooks are a way to manage that complexity from an imperative perspective with the illusion of a declarative veneer.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#195

Post by kin »

ng12 wrote: post #192
desc wrote: post #156

I'm going to express something a lot of people are thinking and are being far too diplomatic about. React Hooks are a fucking stupid idea and always were. They're basically just adding dynamic scoping to a language and framework which doesn't need it, in one of the most 'magical' and confusing ways possible. You have to care about execution order to understand exactly how they'll all work and that will bite you event…

I don't really understand this. Can you explain how hooks relate to dynamic scoping?

Basically every call of a functional component MyComponent() represents a new scope. When you're working with a hook such as useEffect(), you have to pay attention to the dynamic scope so and correctly trigger the useEffect() with the dependency array.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#196

Post by traderjane »

dcre wrote: post #114
traderjane wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A stateful function with effects. Your language just doesn’t have a primitive to express it. I wonder what about generator functions?

I don't see how generators would change anything here. "with effects", "stateful", and the integration between the two are all equally important in the statement.

What are generators for you?

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#197

Post by TomMarius »

frank_nitti wrote: post #173
TomMarius wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example Angular templates, stuff like Razor in .NET, etc?

Perhaps I have missed the point, then. I see the same magnitude of departure of Razor from pure C#, QML from pure Qt C++, and JSX from pure DOM JS. All of the above move the developer from procedural native code, to declarative markup. If the assertion is just that `var div = document.createElement('div')` is quite similar to `var div = React.createElement('div');` then of course I agree. In this sense, JSX+React is…

The point is that is equivalent to React.createElement(Component, {prop:0}, []) - it's a static, typed descriptor, and you imported the Component from somewhere because it's just another function/class. There is no such equivalence in magical templates of Angular or Razor - the JSX won't break as long as JavaScript can call functions, and will behave exactly in that way.

Yes, it's a move to declarative code from procedural one, that's right; what's important for my distinction is how is the move done. The question we're answering with React (as opposed to Vue, Angular, Razor...) is not declarative/procedural, but magical/not magical.

P.S. I heard that templates in Angular are not just templates anymore, they're converting them to function calls - I don't know the specifics, last Angular i saw was version 2.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#198

Post by nickbauman »

acemarke wrote: post #164
vosper wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I look back on all our HOCs and function as children and shudder compared to how easy it is with hooks. If by "function as children" you're referring to render props, personally I was really happy to see that short-lived fad die out. I don't think render props made things simpler. Now if we can admit we never needed Sagas just to do some data fetching maybe we can burn that stalled-out old bandwagon, too :D (Sagas…

I'm a Redux maintainer, and yes, I keep trying to tell people that 95% of Redux apps don't need sagas. They're a great power tool for those cases when you have truly complex async workflows, but they're complete overkill for basic data fetching behavior. I wrote about why I chose thunks as the default in our Redux Toolkit package: https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2020/02/blogged-answers-wh... and our Style Guide doc…

One of the things I love about ClojureScript's Reagent library is that I will never need something like Redux because Clojure has was Redux does "for free." Reactive state management is baked in at the language level.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#199

Post by [deleted] »

Saaster wrote: post #43
dcre wrote: post #28

An important point I don't see being made in the article or the comments is that hooks are meant as a more faithful (or at least less misleading) representation of what was going on under the hood in React already. The problem with the JS class representation is that people already understand what classes and instances are, and that leads to incorrect inferences about how React is working. In addition to better-organ…

As a user of a library, I don't really care how it works. Under the hood it can be arbitrarily complex or simple, and please feel free to change the implementation weekly for all I care. I care very deeply about my own components, when they render, what causes them to re-render, and that I can control and reason about when they re-render. Also, stability of API (in number of years) is way more important than new whiz…

[deleted]

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#200

Post by duxup »

jonny_eh wrote: post #157
desc wrote: post #156

I'm going to express something a lot of people are thinking and are being far too diplomatic about. React Hooks are a fucking stupid idea and always were. They're basically just adding dynamic scoping to a language and framework which doesn't need it, in one of the most 'magical' and confusing ways possible. You have to care about execution order to understand exactly how they'll all work and that will bite you event…

I never understood what was wrong with class components anyways. What did Hooks bring that couldn't be done in an easier to understand way with class components?

I found class components really....wordy binding this to this all the time and lifecycle methods could become kinda wild after a while doing all these checks for a bunch of things...and imo that just trended towards these bulky spaghetti class components / lifecycle methods.
Post reply on HN