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A Critique of React Hooks

dillonshook.com

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Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#271

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

kybernetikos wrote: post #250
omniscient_oce wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know how hooks work that well but I find them easier in general to make quick reusable stuff or just plug things in without having to worry about layers deep of Higher order components. There used to be class = logic , pure function = takes data and outputs jsx. But now functional components manage their own state and somehow trigger rerenders of themselves (how do they do this btw?). So they don't r…

> don't really seem to be 'functional' in the functional programming sense, but more the 'we use the function syntax of JS' sense That's right. A true function has referential transparency. I get that hooks have ergonomic benefits in some situations, but I wish people wouldn't call them "functional".

Who is saying that, the point of hooks is composability.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#272

Post by untog »

greatwhitenorth wrote: post #269
untog wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how that is relevant to the quote I was replying to: "React is great because it's vanilla Javascript". Vanilla Javascript works in a browser with zero transpiling. That's important. (also, "if you know JavaScript you know JSX" is objectively untrue! There are plenty of JS developers that don't work with JSX)

We're talking two different things. I'm talking about the developer perspective. You're talking about browser. If a JS developer doesn't work or understand JSX, they don't understand the fundamental concept of JavaScript which is what an expression is. "if you know JavaScript you know JSX" - JSX is just a JavaScript expression. There is nothing more to it.

> We're talking two different things. I'm talking about the developer perspective. You're talking about browser.

I'm not. I'm talking about a programming language. It has a spec.

"if you know JavaScript you know JSX" - JSX is just a JavaScript expression.

This is nonsense. Where is JSX in the JavaScript spec?

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#273

Post by karatestomp »

omniscient_oce wrote: post #235
Sophistifunk wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. So much this. You are 100% correct. Hooks are incredibly stupid. No, your component is not "functional" because you don't use the word "this". You still have a "this", it's just fucking secret now so your debugging is harder. I could go on about all the other reasons hooks are stupid, but JavaScript is largely a cargo cult and I'm a nobody so I'd just be wasting my breath.

I honestly don't know how hooks work that well but I find them easier in general to make quick reusable stuff or just plug things in without having to worry about layers deep of Higher order components. There used to be class = logic , pure function = takes data and outputs jsx. But now functional components manage their own state and somehow trigger rerenders of themselves (how do they do this btw?). So they don't r…

How objects work: there's a lookup table for methods and properties associated with your instance to find them by name (or call signature, or whatever).

How hooks work: there's a lookup array associated with your instance (yes, an instance of an object—read the code if you're skeptical, and besides functions are objects in JS anyway so even if I'm wrong, which I'm not, I'm technically right) to find properties and methods by reference order(!?!)

Hooks are just a crippled implementation of objects with weird syntax. In a language that already has non-crippled ones built in with less-weird syntax.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#274

Post by lucideer »

lhorie wrote: post #185
dgritsko wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, "More Stuff to Learn" isn't really a critique of hooks, it's a critique of learning .

TFA addresses this: it qualifies by saying learning is good as long as it's useful outside of whatever narrow scope they appear. The real criticism in that section is that hooks (and e.g. gotchas related to things like useEffect, stale closures, etc) are non-transferrable knowledge.

As others have said, I still don't really think it's applicable because learning hooks takes an hour or two, but to try and address that point: I don't really think the knowledge is non-transferable at all.

There's two aspects to learning hooks:

1. Learning the API. This is not a "conceptual" part of learning but rather "this function name does this thing". This is the same with learning any programming API and is almost always non-transferrable (with the minor exception of some open standards, except that varying implementations of them still tend to have quirks).

2. Learning the patterns and concepts around applying that API to problems. As far as I've seen just from TFA examples, they're very widely applicable. Memoization is widespread. Functional style is widespread. The most complex stuff handled by the quoted examples is maintaining state in nested hashtables, which is such a widespread concept that observable/immutable libraries like MobX et al & ImmutableJS et al have been written pretty much focused entirely on this problem space.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#275

Post by jiofih »

ng12 wrote: post #76
jiofih wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn’t actually counter any of the authors’ points. This wonderful functional declarative pipe method of building UI applications where things are built using a straight-line series of composed functional transformations can really suck in real world applications as he tries to demonstrate. Anyone building with hooks now can relate to hooks bringing disorder to the codebase. Has your experience been different? Ho…

Well #2 isn't really a pitfall, for starters. I have a new feature that solved a problem I had but I can't use it in the code I wrote before I had it without refactoring? I don't think that critique really has anything to do with Hooks, just software development. It's also basically a rephrasing of #3.

Unless you work on anything beyond a small codebase, and suddenly half of your code cannot be composed with the other.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#276

Post by [deleted] »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #214
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…

This. So much this. You are 100% correct. Hooks are incredibly stupid. No, your component is not "functional" because you don't use the word "this". You still have a "this", it's just fucking secret now so your debugging is harder. I could go on about all the other reasons hooks are stupid, but JavaScript is largely a cargo cult and I'm a nobody so I'd just be wasting my breath.

[deleted]

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#277

Post by yawaramin »

acemarke wrote: post #232
yawaramin wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you're factually wrong. Abramov is the current React maintainer. Markbage is obviously a core team member but contributing good ideas doesn't automatically transform one into being the project maintainer.

Uh... there's not a _single_ React "maintainer". There's a React _team_, which currently consists of: - Seb Markbage: general deep thinking and vision, works on Suspense and some of the server rendering - Andrew Clark: implemented much of the Suspense and Concurrent Mode core - Dan Abramov: started Create-React-App, wrote the hooks and Concurrent Mode docs, works on various parts of the library and tooling - Brian Va…

Thank you for the correction. I didn't realize they structured the team without a 'maintainer' role.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#278

Post by kin »

ng12 wrote: post #244
kin wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, but the callback passed to useEffect is only scoped to the call stack triggered by the dependency array. So, this makes the callback passed to useEffect dynamically scoped.

The callback is always defined it's just not always invoked. Otherwise it's a regular lexical closure like any callback in JavaScript. Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean by dynamic scope.

Yes, it's just regular lexical closure. I don't think his comment was literal since JS itself is lexically scoped. If you think about how `this` works in JS, it's very similar to dynamic scoping because it matters where the function is called.

With hooks and dependency arrays, similar to dynamically scoped languages, it matters where the function is called.

Thing is, people rarely write functions and use `this` is in dynamically scoped ways anymore. Remember when you had to explicitly bind function scope everywhere? With ES6 and arrow functions, I don't miss that.

Anyway, hooks forces you into that mindset now.

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#279

Post by parley »

nammi wrote: post #155
parley wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> React developers do not understand functional programming As some sibling comments note, this is not a fair conclusion to draw. And not that it disproves your statement, but Reacts original creator Jordan Walke wrote the first React prototype in SML. Not understanding functional programming is not on the list of things I would ascribe to him. He's a smart guy. On a slightly different note, I'd recommend anyone try…

Do you have any good resources for getting started with Reason? I've tried a couple times, but it seems like there's a schism between https://reasonml.github.io/ and https://reasonml.org/

Yeah, I'm not really plugged into the community that well but I think reasonml.org is the long term plan and that some sort of transition might be going on? I've mostly used reasonml.github.io and Bucklescript docs, but lately I've started using the Discord channel and it's very welcoming, friendly and helpful!

Re: A Critique of React Hooks

#280

Post by sibeliuss »

kls wrote: post #261
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how people claim this is hiding huge levels of complexity. It's trivial syntactic sugar. If stylistically, you don't like it, oppose it on those grounds. But complexity? It is syntactic sugar for a function call.

The opposition to it on fundamental grounds is born out of wrongheaded and misapplied best practices and quite frankly it needs to die. Dijkstra is credited with the idea of separations of concerns which is a valid application of code organizational management. The problem is, somewhere along the way (in the dawn of the web) we conflated separation of technology with separations of concerns. Thinking that separating…

This argument maps to CSS-in-JS, too. It's a misunderstanding that this pattern would be rejected outright.
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