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Does anybody like React?
331–340 of 353 posts
Re: Does anybody like React?
#332What's interesting to me is that it seems a lot of people got burned by AngularJs (Angular 1) and now swear off Angular as a whole. Like many, I came from pre-SPA days -> AngularJs -> Angular 2 -> Modern Angular. I tried react a few times, plus React Native but found it hard. I wasn't good with a slightly different render-syntax (whereas Angular uses HTML) and every project I was on was wildly different from each oth…
For what it is worth, I missed AngularJS/Angular 1 and managed to use Aurelia to avoid several versions of Angular 2+. When I did get eventually pressured into working on Angular it was a nightmare for several reasons. One of them was I got hugely burnt by Zone.js. Angular is finally doing something about Zone.js years after my warning. (Though it took Signals to push them to do it, which is another rant because Sign…
happy to see another fan of aurelia here.
i actually started with angular 1 before it became popular. i evaluated the alternatives at the time, knockout, ember and a few others, and angularjs just looked the best. finally when angular 1 was no longer maintained i discovered aurelia, in part because rob eisenberg had an interesting story about how he got invited to the angular team because of his ideas, and how he left again because he could not actually get his ideas implemented.
it's a bit disappointing that development of aurelia 2 is slow going, but in some ways i consider that a good thing, considering how fast vue and svelte are evolving away from what they were originally.
i need to look at solid.js though. the only promising newcomer in resent years if the state of js survey is any indication.
Re: Does anybody like React?
#333More than React, I'm interested in the question of how to best write UI through code, in general. Even though I'm a fan of React, and use it for practically every web application I build, my biggest and most obvious issue has been that writing UIs through React doesn't feel as natural as, say, writing command line tools in Go, or live/realtime apps in Elixir. Some languages just feel incredibly natural and frictionle…
I don’t think UI’s natural interface is visual. I think the natural interface is a state machine.
The most reliable and performant UI code I’ve written usually tackles this head on by thinking through all the possibilities of different states the application can be in and how the transition of each state should look. This can very quickly get mind boggling complex.
Systems programming languages seem like they model their problems better because it’s less common to ask a systems programmer for a like button that shows bubbles when you press it. If you model your UI explicitly like a state machine, you can say “no” to the bubbles like every systems programmer says “no” to most features, because you realize the explosion of state will be unmanageable. Or you can use a JavaScript framework and download a bubbles package and wonder why your app is buggy, but have job security.
Re: Does anybody like React?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you used Svelte? I can’t see why anyone would like React more. The only upside I think react has it’s the IBM of frontend. No one has been fired for choosing React.
Svelte is cool although I didn't have some big epiphany. I'm not going to use Svelte because "it compiles" and "is faster" when my existing React app performs very well. Plus there are some libraries for my specific use case that didn't exist in Svelte. I know people love things besides React, and I would be happy to see it unseated. Sure I'm part of the problem but it's been good to me and I have bigger fish to fry.
Just use JS libraries. You don't need wrappers.
Re: Does anybody like React?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
React was a major improvement over Backbone + Marionette. Pre-jQuery was a shit-show as they hadn't even standardised the DOM. Before that was XMLHttpRequest (particularly during my .Net WebForm days) and even had to use the ActiveXObject in IE that predated JSON.
XML, XMLHttpRequest, and XSLT in IE 5 was peak web dev for me. Never been more productive.
Back in the days when launching a website was an event, and sometimes included junket trips to attend.
Re: Does anybody like React?
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe fair maybe not, but definitely unrelated to how intuitive it is.
I'd argue that it's directly related. If intuitive use of a library/framework/pattern commonly causes issues, you have to keep forcing yourself to do use non-intuitive approaches to prevent them. GOTO is also pretty intuitive.
It’s intuitive in the same way Ruby is intuitive, or C, yes, C, is intuitive.
They try to give you the vocabulary to be expressive, then get the hell out of your way. You can still shoot yourself in the foot with them, of course.
I think that has more to do with the design goals of the language. C was designed to be raw and simple, and it does that well. Ruby was designed to read almost like English prose, and it does that well. Rust was specifically designed to make it hard to shoot yourself in the foot, and it does that well too.
I don’t think that was ever a major React design goal. PropTypes helped a bit, but these days TypeScript carries most of the burden of saving developers from themselves.
Anyway, React is far from perfect. But JSX was a neat invention that alleviated the tension between
`something` and
let el = document.createElement(‘div’);
el.innerHTML(‘something’);Re: Does anybody like React?
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
I skimmed through it, and I think the only thing that is out of date is the section on `zone` in Angular. In october 2025, they changed to `zoneless` by default, which uses signals just like Vue. This was a long time coming imo, as the major criticism of Angular was how poorly update management was handled. Also Svelte runes aren't mentioned, as that came out three months after this post. Runes are essentially also s…
The other thing out of date is Svelte using compile-time tracking — Svelte now also uses runtime tracking, i.e. signals. At this point, I think React and Lit are the only major frameworks not using signals. And I'm not 100% sure about Lit.
Lit is pushing for signals too. https://lit.dev/docs/data/signals/
Re: Does anybody like React?
#338JSX is an absolute cancer, I don't trust any developer that thinks JSX is objectively better than SFC.
Re: Does anybody like React?
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why over vue? My biggest frustration has been how vue ends up moving in the direction of react. The original component architecture with the html template, JavaScript state and css styles in vue was so nice. Even the data fetching a url in the component was so intuitive.
as long as JSX never becomes default in Vue, vue is still winning
Amen.
Re: Does anybody like React?
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