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Does anybody like React?

jsx.lol

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Re: Does anybody like React?

#341

Post by altbdoor »

WorldMaker wrote: post #312
altbdoor wrote: post #9

I read one post before that really resonates with me, couldn't recall from where though: You love JSX, you don't love React Many of the jobs in my location requires React though, so I have to tolerate it somehow.

There's several frameworks that use JSX but don't act like React. I definitely have found myself in the "I love JSX but don't always love React" camp. I used Cycle.JS for a while, but came back to React for the ecosystem. For what it is worth, I'm rather proud of my smaller reactive (RxJS-based) JSX alternative (Butterfloat), which is not a Virtual DOM like React or Cycle.JS (it is more "What if Knockout but TSX?"),…

Just found the link to the project: https://github.com/WorldMaker/butterfloat

That's neat, will give it a spin in the future.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#342

Post by iammrpayments »

rbbydotdev wrote: post #225

Open source tech is a marketplace of ideas. If you have a more perfect alternative then it will prevail. Granted none of these critics have a viable tried and true alternative. It’s easy to throw shade at any abstraction. None will ever be perfect! That said, I welcome any new paradigms and ideas. But discounting how far we’ve come with what’s possible on the frontend with hand waves just doesn’t cut it for me.

What you mean there’s no viable alternative to react? Is this a joke?

Re: Does anybody like React?

#343

Post by yxhuvud »

moojacob wrote: post #301
yxhuvud wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the best way to solve the back button question to not be so damned complicated and just make certain that only things which you want to go back to ends up in the history? The whole framing of the problem just screams "structure your thing better and it won't be a problem to solve".

Re-read it. We needed to preserve scroll position when you went back. If you just linked back to the inbox it would kick you to the top of the screen.

That is not how the back button works in a regular browser. Something you are doing is breaking the default behavior. Stop that.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#344

Post by WorldMaker »

em-bee wrote: post #332
WorldMaker wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lef…

I was more of a fan of Durandal, which was Aurelia's predecessor. It was a SPA wrapper around out-of-the-box Knockout. It seemed cleanly focused and was useful in that you didn't need to learn a different view engine if you were already using Knockout.

Following Rob's blog because of Durandal was a part of how I landed on "try to avoid Angular" and it did give me Aurelia as a bit of arsenal to say "hey, this framework is enough like Angular that it should feel comfortable to work in" for a time.

I never did end up liking Aurelia more than Durandal, but I certainly liked it more than Angular.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#345

Post by b4ckup »

satvikpendem wrote: post #288
b4ckup wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never get this take. A react component is not just a function, it's a function plus a magically injected context that is accessed through hooks which requires all kinds of guarantees that you have to be aware of otherwise it will have hard to debug consequences. Imo it's anything but elegant. I did projects in all major frameworks and am building a huge angular web app currently. In angular a component is represent…

React uses an algebraic effectful function model which is elegant once one understands it: https://overreacted.io/algebraic-effects-for-the-rest-of-us/

So it makes sense because there's a fancy name for it? For a moment let's just imagine you are inventing a brand new UI framework. You obviously want to have components in it. So how do you represent a component in your new framework? A component needs state, logic and a way to render that state. Do you choose to represent the component as a class which naturally encapsulates state as properties and logic as methods or do you choose to represent components as functions which lack state so you bolt it on via an implicitly injected context that you access via abstractions?

Re: Does anybody like React?

#346

Post by b4ckup »

TonyStr wrote: post #221
b4ckup wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never get this take. A react component is not just a function, it's a function plus a magically injected context that is accessed through hooks which requires all kinds of guarantees that you have to be aware of otherwise it will have hard to debug consequences. Imo it's anything but elegant. I did projects in all major frameworks and am building a huge angular web app currently. In angular a component is represent…

Maybe you would prefer React's class-based syntax. It's still there if you want to use it

I actually do and my critique is directed at function components which seems to be the standard nowadays.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#347

Post by em-bee »

WorldMaker wrote: post #344
em-bee wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lef…

I was more of a fan of Durandal, which was Aurelia's predecessor. It was a SPA wrapper around out-of-the-box Knockout. It seemed cleanly focused and was useful in that you didn't need to learn a different view engine if you were already using Knockout. Following Rob's blog because of Durandal was a part of how I landed on "try to avoid Angular" and it did give me Aurelia as a bit of arsenal to say "hey, this framewor…

makes sense. i was obviously coming from angular, and as i said before, i did look at knockout and i found angular was the better choice. so i guess aurelia's appeal then came naturally. but then i didn't know about durandal, so i can't say how much i would have liked it. but this tells me that angular had a stronger influence on aurelia than i was aware of. that's not surprising of course, but still interesting.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#348

Post by r0m4n0 »

pibaker wrote: post #210
r0m4n0 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never been able to pick the framework and libraries for my day job. I’m almost always working on something someone started years prior or bound to an organization that has strict choices. Personally I wouldn’t pick react :) React wins because it has become a default choice and folks like what’s comfortable to their preferences

I mean, that means someone at your work liked React enough to choose it over the alternatives. I see a lot of personal projects, solo founder applications etc running made in React. I respect your opinion but other people definitely do choose it when they have fully control of what they use.

Hey careful, I actually didn't say I do or have worked with React :)

I think you get me now but I'm just merely stating the stickiness and trendiness of these architecture decisions. Some other people mention this but just because a majority of the industry works on something doesn't mean it is the best.

I am a bit of the proof of this. I work on Angular at Google and have for a long time. It is kind of comical because I have worked on a few side projects outside of Google and I always use Angular, I know it too well.

I built a massive Angular webapp recently (2025) outside of Google and have had multiple people approach me about migrating it to React. They come at me like this is some old thing that needs to be refactored to unlock the modern times. It's just curious, there are large groups of people that don't really even understand what they are doing, they are just chasing words and hype. Mind you, there are reasons to pick one framework over the other still... but let's at least debate that instead of just the names of frameworks. React has won the framework adoption race so I can't argue much there.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#349

Post by satvikpendem »

b4ckup wrote: post #345
satvikpendem wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React uses an algebraic effectful function model which is elegant once one understands it: https://overreacted.io/algebraic-effects-for-the-rest-of-us/

So it makes sense because there's a fancy name for it? For a moment let's just imagine you are inventing a brand new UI framework. You obviously want to have components in it. So how do you represent a component in your new framework? A component needs state, logic and a way to render that state. Do you choose to represent the component as a class which naturally encapsulates state as properties and logic as methods…

Read into how OCaml 5 does it and you'll have your answer.

Re: Does anybody like React?

#350

Post by owebmaster »

narvidas wrote: post #318
bryanhogan wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus there are some libraries for my specific use case that didn't exist in Svelte. A lot of these libraries aren't needed in Svelte because 1) the functionality might already be built into Svelte, and 2) you can use any JavaScript library directly, unlike in React where you often need a React-specific wrapper. Not saying that applies to your specific use case, but I've seen this argument way too many times.

As someone who has written both React and Svelte for many years I must interject. React is itself just a library. No, you don’t need any specific “wrappers” for it. Let’s not mislead the readers here.

A wrapper is a quite common pattern in react, even if it's just to create some hooks and call it react-anything
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