Darn, more LLM-generated blog posts?
React is winning by default and slowing innovation
271–280 of 866 posts
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? I don't care how the chrome engine works. I care about building a great CX and making money
This is the difference, and why we can never understand each other. I couldn’t care less how much customers like something; what matters to me is if it’s technically perfect. This is also why I will never be happy at any job, because it turns out technical perfection doesn’t pay the bills.
I generally agree with you, but if you only care about technical perfection, it can happen that something is "technically perfect", but insufferable to use.
For example, I'm sure many of the common command-line utilities are considered technically perfect by their developers, but outside of some common use cases you've memorized, they are all a pain to use because of how undiscoverable CLI is by its nature. The "wrong input, go read some manuals" style of error messages doesn't help either.
I myself always start from user requirements and work my way down from there.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#273[dead]
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why don’t we just switch over to Vue? If DX is such a driver for deciding to use a web framework, Vue kicks React’s ass, and that’s just objectively speaking.
I did switch over to Vue.
Well not technically switch, I never learned React properly because I didn't like it when it first came out and by the time I gave it a second look there were already a gazillion React devs so I just stuck with Vue.
Vue just seems much more intuitive and sane to me. Sane is relative for front end frameworks of course. Don't get me started on Angular I got PTSD and couldn't code for a couple of months from a large Angular project with an offshore team.
I do get the benefit of using these framework for teams, and they are nifty once you get what is happening, but I still scratch my head when I see all the steps and files to do simple things I used to bang out in a few dozen lines of jQuery.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#275React is fine, React Hooks isn't. It's cryptic, convoluted, and adds noise.
Yes, both have overhead but they let you mutate refs when you need 120fps feedback.
IMO, the best competitor is its legacy API. Want reactive shared state? 70 LoC:
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#276Too much of the JavaScript ecosystem is "resume-driven innovation" or "innovation so my name is at the top of the dependencies/downloads chart(s)". Unfortunately this drowns out genuinely useful ideas and tools.
This seems unlikely. People are creating libraries and they're getting a lot of downloads because they're genuinely useful. It's a lot of work to write and maintain a library just for resume street cred.
I think the ecosystem has more of the opposite problem: engineers create libraries to scratch a particular itch, because they needed to solve a problem for their own project, or maybe it seemed like an interesting solution that they wanted to share with the world. If the person was working for a company, they may even be paid to maintain it for a while.
A bunch of other projects start depending on it, but the original creator/maintainer has moved on. They might not even be using the library for their own projects any more, nor paid to work on it. Now they're stuck maintaining it out of a feeling of obligation, or maybe it's a passion, but at a certain point it becomes unsustainable and the project becomes unmaintained or under-maintained (huge backlog of tickets). Maybe they find new blood to help out, maybe they don't.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be nitpicky, React itself does not specify that state management must be global. It was a popular pattern, starting with Facebook's blog post on Flux and made popular by Redux. And certain newer features like hydration/SSR and suspense more or less require a global store because their data can't be kept in the tree. But in many cases you can keep state local with useState and Recoil/Jotai and frameworks that keep…
fwiw i've never experienced the drawback of separate languages for server and client. nor did i ever experience the benefit of single language across server and client. being forced to use javascript on the server sounds like a cruel joke vs a benefit. I mean just simply from "i can literally pick anything for my controlled server env" vs "no we're a js shop cuz web" edit to add: is it one repo? or maybe shared types…
HTML templates and the shadow DOM solved the only problem of separated languages that I have ever actually seen.
So yeah, once there was a benefit for using the same language. IMO, it never was worth the cost. But it doesn't exist anymore anyway.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#278React 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…
A front end web framework with global state management should be a last resort for a website. Coming out of the gate with it is just ridiculous IMO. Most peoples websites are just not that complex. There's like an escalation ladder in my mind: - just write HTML - statically generate the HTML - dynamically generate the HTML - dynamically generate the HTML at a smaller granularity (HTMX et all) - augment your HTML with…
I just use svelte. It works with raw html.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#279React 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…
Super insightful. I hadn’t been able to articulate the same feelings. Even as Next seppukus itself, people will likely just fall back to React on Vite… This is my exact read on the situation, as well. I’m not sure if anything can meaningful affect React’s domination in the short-term or medium-term, even with the accumulation of poor choices.
I haven’t tried tanstack-start, but I wouldn’t be surprised it becomes the defacto react framework instead of next. Everything by Tanner Linsley is just so well thought out and the DX is amazing. If his framework is the same level of quality, without any major gaps compared to next, it will probably blow next out of the water.
And Tanner is already a huge name in the typescript/react world, so I think there is actually a chance.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#280Darn, more LLM-generated blog posts?
> The problem isn’t React itself, it’s the React-by-default mindset.
> The loss isn’t just performance, it’s opportunity cost when better-fit alternatives are never evaluated.
> That’s not healthy competition; it’s ecosystem capture by default.
The "It's not , it's " really gives it away.