This is why I avoid hooks. I design my components to use state and I find hooks to not fit well in my applications.
A Critique of React Hooks
41–50 of 298 posts
Re: A Critique of React Hooks
#42Hooks elucidate everything I've felt wrong about React, but have not been able to put my finger on it until recently.
Hooks reveal two major things with React:
1) React developers did not understand the component paradigm that they originally went with. If they did, then they would understand how silly it is that components cannot reuse logic. This was an entire debate many years ago. Composition vs. inheritance. You don't need to throw out classes or objects to get reuse.
2) React developers do not understand functional programming. I could write an entire essay on this. But it should suffice to say, FUNCTIONS DO NOT HAVE STATE. What React hooks introduce has more in common with dynamic scoping, of older LISPs. It fundamentally breaks lexical scoping, which is incredibly important for understanding code flow. You have to be constantly aware of when it's safe to use certain variables and the implications of using variables in certain scopes now. In 2020!! This is INSANE.
Re: A Critique of React Hooks
#43An important point I don't see being made in the article or the comments is that hooks are meant as a more faithful (or at least less misleading) representation of what was going on under the hood in React already. The problem with the JS class representation is that people already understand what classes and instances are, and that leads to incorrect inferences about how React is working. In addition to better-organ…
As a user of a library, I don't really care how it works. Under the hood it can be arbitrarily complex or simple, and please feel free to change the implementation weekly for all I care. I care very deeply about my own components, when they render, what causes them to re-render, and that I can control and reason about when they re-render. Also, stability of API (in number of years) is way more important than new whiz-bang features.
Re: A Critique of React Hooks
#44[deleted]
Re: A Critique of React Hooks
#45Hooks are magic with new rules that are different from regular JavaScript. They don't follow the regular flow you'd expect it would. Requires devs to think a lot about hooks to make sure something is messing them up. Also needing eslint to make sure your code is ok, is a boy flakey. Hooks it's like learning a new language pretty much, which is only useful for react. I'm using them because of lack of better things.
Once you understand that function components aren't simple, contained functions but rather components that exist in a parent scope (React) and that React actively manages them, it's not magic at all. Also, you don't need ESLint; the rules are pretty simple.
Re: A Critique of React Hooks
#46There's yet another valuable hooks critique that I recommend you to read - https://typeofweb.com/wady-react-hooks/ (Use Google Translate to convert Polish to English)
Re: A Critique of React Hooks
#47Hooks elucidate everything I've felt wrong about React, but have not been able to put my finger on it until recently. Hooks reveal two major things with React: 1) React developers did not understand the component paradigm that they originally went with. If they did, then they would understand how silly it is that components cannot reuse logic. This was an entire debate many years ago. Composition vs. inheritance. You…
> they did not understand
> they do not understand
> This is insane
This sort of post that asserts that nobody understood or put delicate thought into something is just pompous and lacks intellectual curiosity.
At least respond to their rationale. In doing so, you’ll find that everything is just trade-offs.
btw Dan Abramov is great to follow on twitter. He often responds to criticism and clarifies React decisions and links to good blog posts. If you use twitter it’s a nice way to get polite, bite-sized wisdom about React and Javascript. At the least you’ll realize how much good thought goes into React.
Re: A Critique of React Hooks
#48An important point I don't see being made in the article or the comments is that hooks are meant as a more faithful (or at least less misleading) representation of what was going on under the hood in React already. The problem with the JS class representation is that people already understand what classes and instances are, and that leads to incorrect inferences about how React is working. In addition to better-organ…
It's interesting that the original appeal of React was that it was "just a view library", but now apparently it's more like a "language". It really shows the biases of the maintainers (the "just a library" thing being a philosophy I liked from vjeux, and the "language-likeness" being very obviously a heavy influence from sebmarkbage). The thing w/ "language-ness" (as opposed to "library-ness") is that additions and changes to a language tend to become more and more difficult to make over time because semantics deeply affect everything in the system, whereas well designed APIs in a library-oriented approach can be well encapsulated.
I've said for a while, for example, that throwing promises for Suspense is using up "escape hatches" in JS. The rule of hooks is another one of those. Eventually, the React team will run out of escape hatches to implement "React language" semantics around the real JS semantics, and I suspect at that point sebmarkbage will move on to create a new view framework (as has been the case w/ e.g. sebmack and babel/rome, Rich Harris and ractive/svelte, etc).
It'll be interesting to see if whoever steps up to maintain React at that point will be able to grok its internal complexity, and to see how the community reacts to a rift when their favorite view library team pushes for one vision but the moved-on "rockstar facebook engineer" pushes for a different vision.
EDIT: fixed name confusion (thanks, swyx!)
Re: A Critique of React Hooks
#49My biggest worry with React is that it has restless developers with idle hands.
I have (a lot of) component code that will never be converted to hooks. Can I rely on you not to flake out and pull an Angular on me?
Re: A Critique of React Hooks
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, "More Stuff to Learn" isn't really a critique of hooks, it's a critique of learning .
Yeah, I don't really get this criticism in regards to hooks. I think it took me maybe an hour to learn them. That's basically nothing.
I've never* used hooks and I only got 1 question wrong in the author's Google Forms quiz (would've been 2 wrong, but bullet point 4 had already signposted the object equality gotcha).
So there doesn't seem to be a huge amount to learn in hooks as far as I can tell.
* I am an experienced React developer but haven't had much opportunity to work with it in the past 2 years.