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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

#241

Post by markmark »

apsurd wrote: post #225
recursive wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither react's JSX nor vue's template language are HTML. But rejecting vue's template on grounds that it's not HTML seems odd. React's JSX deviates from HTML in many ways. Like class vs className. XML self-closing vs HTML self-closing. onchange vs oninput. On purely aesthetic grounds, I can't understand how the react idiom of array.map() would ever be preferable to an affordance in the (non-HTML) template language f…

it's not about feigning html purity it's the opposite. Why pretend we're using HTML when it's not? so with react it becomes a js flavor, jsx, which some people hate but it's very clear that it's a made up language IN real javascript. edit: the mental model is instant: it's just javascript for reals. do anything you want in javascript using real js primitives. it's not about looking pretty, jsx doesn't. it's about not…

Completely agree with you. Every time I see yet another template language adding some clumsy for-each loop syntax I sigh. Just let us use a normal programming language. As an example I give you every template system ever invented. Devops tooling is full of them.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#242

Post by rtpg »

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…

My main complaint about React is the sort of lackluster quality of loads of React-adjacent libraries, by people who seem obsessed with "we're doing Yet Another Rewrite and a major version bump".

It's not that hard to maintain API stability folks! Try a bit harder!

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#243

Post by sfink »

tracker1 wrote: post #20

The premise is bullshit... there were LOTS of competing options when React first came out... it wasn't really until Redux hit that a lot of people started seriously using it. A lot of the flux implementations were painful, configuring Webpack was a pain, etc, etc. It may be the default today, but it largely earned that position by being one of the better options out there. Today there's alternatives and even Angular…

> The premise is bullshit... there were LOTS of competing options when React first came out...

Good thing that wasn't the premise, then.

The article is specifically looking at reasons for React's success other than its technical merits. It does not deny that it has merits, nor does it deny that its success is partly due to them. It only says that its current success is no longer wholly due to them, and backs the point up with examples of alternatives that are claimed to be technically superior and that are not achieving success commensurate with that superiority.

You can disagree on the superiority claims, you can disagree that innovation in this area is a good thing (many don't!), but I think the main claim is very believable: that in the present day, React's success is heavily helped by its default status.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#244

Post by kcrwfrd_ »

latchkey wrote: post #230
byteCoder wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenNext on Cloudflare is the only way I've successfully gotten NextJS to work in a Cloudflare Worker. https://opennext.js.org/cloudflare

Interesting. Yea, I didn't want a worker, just a static html page with my javascript.

You need to configure it for static export if that’s what you want: https://nextjs.org/docs/app/guides/static-exports

But this won’t support all framework features. The default expectation for Next.js is with a server runtime for SSR.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#246

Post by spartanatreyu »

cheesekunator wrote: post #189
ForHackernews wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Angular is used a lot in enterprise apps/services when they need a low risk one-way to do things (e.g. Apple's App Store developer portal).

React is used in enterprise when teams need to move fast and break things (e.g. Microsoft Edge's UI after switching from Trident/Spartan/EdgeHTML to Chromium) and tend to be replaced with something else when dev teams / managers realise that they need to rebuild it anyway just to keep it maintained and/or gain more performance. (e.g. Edge "WebUI 2.0" moving their browser UI from react to web components)

Vue is used a lot in Asian enterprise markets.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#247

Post by bilekas »

I really don't like react but I can understand for huge projects and maybe multiple teams it creates an opportunity to have to good standardisation around the framework you create. But ask yourself how many react projects "need" all the tools and utils and nice things react can offer. Sometimes it just feels like the default when something far lighter would be so much simpler and easier to finish.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#248

Post by jiggawatts »

ChromaticPanic wrote: post #210
ForHackernews wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's why it's so good. You can pick what you want instead of being told what to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

In practice, at scale, in an ecosystem instead of a toy project, excessive choice is counterintuitively a bad thing.

It's hugely beneficial to have common ground and shared interfaces when integrating code from third parties, or collaborating across multiple teams.

> You can pick

A golden rule of large enterprise is that there is no "you".

As soon as there are two people working independently, not to mention different business units or teams, different choices will be made. Incompatible choices.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#250

Post by nazgul17 »

alpinisme wrote: post #233
ricardobeat wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the cost is an extra few milliseconds of render time and few extra hours of dev time That is very optimistic. Most React projects never get to the optimization stage, and end up with seconds of rendering and transition delays that significantly harm UX. And the amount of time spent battling hooks, re-renders, compatibility issues, etc amounts to hundreds of hours over the course of a medium-sized project, thousa…

“Most” react apps needing “seconds” definitely needs some citation or evidence. Even in fairly heavy and laggy react apps, it’s still usually network latency, waterfall requests, ad/tracking bloatware, large asset sizes, and the usual old classics that cause perceptible slowness in my experience.

In my humble (backender) opinion, if it's hard to use a tool right, that counts as a cons, and that must be accounted for when choosing which tool to use.
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