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React is winning by default and slowing innovation

lorenstew.art

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Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#481

Post by rckt »

Oh my god. This heading reminded me of a statement/question about keeping up to date with things in the JS world. I do it only when required by a task or (only when I have time, that I don't have much) very rarely out of curiosity.

People creating new JS stuff with an enormous pace. I moved my personal website 4 or 5 times already trying out different frameworks. No benefits, just wasting time creating the same output, but in another context. And I doubt I'm gonna do it again without a serious reason.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#482

Post by austin-cheney »

adastra22 wrote: post #343
austin-cheney wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It’s actually the same effort either way, but one of those costs substantially more to maintain and performs far slower.

It is not obvious to me which one you are talking about.

The framework solution will end up costing more over the life of your application due to artificial restrictions, leaky abstractions, extra dependencies, performance decreases, and more code to maintain. In most cases all of those are acceptable if the developers are less comfortable making original architectural decisions.

For me that comfort is achieved through reuse and audits around data structure types through use of TypeScript. Now that ThpeScript is natively supported in Node it’s even faster still because there is no need for a build or compile step. The code just runs as is. This is also even true for code that executes only in the browser so long as it’s imported into a node module, which I do anyway to reduce the number of file requests into the browser.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#483

Post by satellite2 »

uoaei wrote: post #453
Narew wrote: post #439

I'm not a front end dev and only use JS stuff time to time for small personal project. There is so much JS framework out there that appear and disappear so fast. I don't know if we can call it innovation. I have the impression they just reinvent the wheel with so little value added. I prefer to keep on React at least it will not disappear the next time I will do some change on my project.

My pet theory is that frontend devs have so little on the critical path, and are usually overqualified for the kind of work they do, that they keep reinventing these interesting paradigms for managing state in GUIs basically just so they can keep themselves entertained.

Could it be possible your pet theory is pretty generalisable?

My pet theory is that innovation happens when you look at https://xkcd.com/1205/ and estimates it's not worth it and do it anyway.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#484

Post by zelphirkalt »

hobofan wrote: post #432
bluGill wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much innovation is needed. often iteration is better and cheaper.

Maybe my view is tainted by how Next.js implements/propagates it, but the last ~5 years of React has mostly seen iteration in the form of RSC (React Server Components), which in many projects manifests in chaos and creates a steeper learning curve. I do think that React in its history has been able to evolve quite meaningfully, and in a good way (lifecycle methods -> hooks), but in the more recent years, less so.

That's the crux of the matter isn't it? They want to have a JavaScript framework, but when you run it in the browser, all the accessibility issues pop up and additional workarounds are needed, to get the default browser stuff working properly again. We all have seen the many many websites, that break the back button. So they move rendering back to the server, where it was before, with traditional templating engines. But oh, now it's not so nice any longer? Could it be, that the whole approach is not actually that great? Could it be, that a traditional templating engine with a tiny js framework, that is only served on pages when needed and only does little interactivity aspects would serve us better in almost all cases of websites?

I think React and JSX and custom components as they are in React with JSX have people "programming" things, that don't need that kind of programming, as they are static things, that do not need the power of a full blown programming language behind them. In a way JSX is even more cumbersome than some PHP, because it makes you learn a new wannabe HTML syntax, which is not HTML (for example classList instead of class) for little benefit on most websites.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#485

Post by tcfhgj »

Banou wrote: post #424
KronisLV wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See: multi MB downloads to display a few forms in a browser. Software that can’t work well with literal GBs of memory (some of it being a full browser runtime for some desktop forms). Games that run bad thanks to UE5 coming preloaded with footguns that ensure almost every developer will ship games that run poorly. Operating systems that run worse than a decade ago for even the parts that are functionally the same (e.…

React in itself isn't that heavy , and things like preact exists if you want an even lighter library, it's mostly other dependencies that are heavy, so the blame is mostly on the side of the devs, not react, for having heavy and clunky software.

https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...

Select all angular, leptos, vue, solid and react variants -> react literally is consistently the slowest

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#486

Post by j45 »

FpUser wrote: post #303
j45 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React is great at solving complex problems. Not all problems are complex to begin with, and having a complex tool as default otherwise adds complexity to the project and also inflexibility to iterate quickly. This is in addition to having to maintain a relatively brittle ecosystem from past feature as well as future features but that can be true for more than one area of JavaScript or other technologies. Looking for…

>"React is great at solving complex problems." The only thing it is great for is creating complex problems out of simple things.

Haha.

I won't disagree with that - I have seen it used well and not well as well.

Or people asking for "quick tweaks" not understanding that may not be a possibility depending on the programming that may have gone wild too soon.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#487

Post by dariosalvi78 »

tcoff91 wrote: post #330
Tubelord wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all phone apps could be a web app

A great native app on an iPhone feels far superior to a mobile website. The gestures, the stack navigator, haptics, scrolling, native ui primitives, etc… Also iOS accessibility screen reader APIs are way better than the web. Accessibility actions for instance are great.

there are thousands of apps that do not require to be "great native apps". If only Apple invested more on mobile Safari we could have "almost great" web apps and be out of their mafia ecosystem.

I am old enough to remember the days of Internet Explorer, I can tell you that it was not fun. It is a blessing that we can at least deliver some pretty decent web apps today, and we should keep pushing for it.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#488

Post by austin-cheney »

onion2k wrote: post #356
austin-cheney wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong disagree. Web Components are react in different clothing. You don’t need this component-based framework style architecture to write applications for the browser. I promise writing applications for the browsers is not challenging. You don’t need big frameworks or component madness that’s more of the same.

You don’t need big frameworks or component madness that’s more of the same. You don't, but in any sufficiently complex app you'll end up writing a sort of 'mini framework' of your own as you abstract all the things that crop up more than a few times. That framework might be really nice at the start but it'll get more and more hacky as the project continues, especially if you're constrained by resources. Eventually yo…

This has never been true for me. I never end up writing any kind of internal framework. Instead I write libraries that solve specific problems and achieve code reuse, which are really either functions or data storage objects restricted to their own files. At least, that’s how I think about code universally, libraries, but specifically in the browser this comes up less because the problem space is much smaller. Really in the browser it’s all about organizing code around event handling and putting text on screen. Let’s not over think this.

Anyways this idea of internal frameworks has always been weird to me. Nobody says this of code outside the browser, so why would they say this inside the browser? When I think about in those terms this clearly becomes a simple organizational problem and I don’t need a framework telling me how to organize things like a parent telling me to do chores.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#489

Post by zelphirkalt »

spankalee wrote: post #157

Web components are the way out of this trap. Every single framework that isn't React should be wholeheartedly supporting web components to make sure that they have access to a viable ecosystem of components and utilities without having to bootstrap an entire competitor to React and it's ecosystem. While a lot of people view web components as competitors to frameworks, they don't really have to be. The just define an…

But then I want web components that are not react web components, but cross browser standard web components, because if I use a js framework, I don't wanna be loading react as a dependency in the background and carry the same amount of bloat in my dependencies.

And then we are not actually far from what we were always able to do with traditional templating engines, which already allow us to define separate reusable components. It is what they were made for. Full circle back, throw out all the JS frameworks.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#490

Post by nrawe »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #478

Suggestions for future blog articles: "Keyboards and mice are winning by default and slowing innovation" "Web is winning by default and slowing innovation" "Linux servers are winning by default and slowing innovation" They basically write themselves! Don't forget to mention touch screens and track pads in the first one. Have fun, you are welcome.

This really made me laugh, thank you :)
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