Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did duetds.com
Hey I worked on that! And nordhealth.design. Both were used with React. And Vue, and angular, and classic server rendered apps like django
Which pages are django?
React is winning by default and slowing innovation
751–760 of 866 posts
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#752Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nitpick: React compiler is not a transpiler. JSX needs to be transpiled, and that's usually done by TS compiler. React compiler is another optional thing on top that's relatively very recent. https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler/introduction#what-doe...
All compilers translate one language to another language. Historically compilers targeted lower-abstraction languages than the source language. "Transpiler" is a compiler whose input and output abstraction levels are similar. The React cinematic universe has a habit of repurposing existing terminology, but they're both transpilers, to the extent that "transpiler" is even a word.
You are absolutely right! (Here I'm roleplaying an AI chat bot which caught red handed hallucinating).
It appears that I was wrong about the definition of transpilation. It's a specific term for a compiler that compiles from a high-level language to another high-level language, even when those languages are the same with no DSL and even when the logic is optimized.
I stand corrected.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#753I think this article discounts the reasons behind frontend decisions... priorities are absolutely fast execution time and ease of hiring. There is very, very little reason to care about optimizing frontend performance for a vast majority of apps. Users just don't care. It doesn't make the company more money. If a framework is easy to use and everyone knows it, it's simply the best choice for 90%+ of teams.
This isn't true at all if you're working on maintaining a web app. When ease of hiring and getting tasks done quickly have become the priority it's because the business has let too much work pile up. It has very little to do with the money unless it's a small startup. Frontend skills are misunderstood by most of HN because it's a hard role that directly involves business and product wants. There's a ton of hiring (an…
I agree that maintaining web apps is an entirely different set of skills, though in my experience (mostly small and mid size companies) PMs come in with massive projects and huge changes constantly and management has to say yes to a few. I try my best to shield my devs as much as possible from the politics but usually my teams are still ending up with huge 4-5 sprint frontend projects. It's extremely hard to find devs who can create simple technical designs when there is absolutely any frontend complexity (especially things like wizards, why are wizards so hard for people...). My standard these days for a "good hire" is anyone who can handle these sorts of projects without a huge amount of help.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#754This is mostly just a complaint about how good React is. It's so good that it's difficult for the technical benefits of alternatives to outweigh the social benefits of choosing React. Note that this is neither a major compliment to React's technical merits nor a criticism of React's competitors. In fact, I don't even disagree with the author on some of his claims, such as: > React is no longer winning by technical me…
I have been a part of quite a few tech stack decisions at various companies and startups. I have literally never heard an argument made for react that included merits of the framework itself. The decision was always based on a combination for familiarity, ability to hire for eng roles, and the ecosystem.
Yes, that's precisely my point. The technical merits are substantial relative to the previous generation of UI libraries like jQuery. If a team were seriously deciding between React and jQuery today, I hope someone would bring up React's technical merits.
But these substantial technical merits are also largely shared by the other modern React competitors, and the differences between these modern options are small enough that they won't outweigh the social benefits of React (except in narrow use cases).
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#755This is mostly just a complaint about how good React is. It's so good that it's difficult for the technical benefits of alternatives to outweigh the social benefits of choosing React. Note that this is neither a major compliment to React's technical merits nor a criticism of React's competitors. In fact, I don't even disagree with the author on some of his claims, such as: > React is no longer winning by technical me…
Never heard, "man react is great!" It's always, "we can hire more easily". Unfortunately
I can tell you I said "man react is great!" quite a few times 10 years ago when I tried it for the first time, after years of jQuery, backbone.js and Angular 1. Nowadays I still think it's great, but there is obviously no surprise and novelty about it being great since I use it every day. Like I'm sure you think toilets are a great thing but when was the last time you said "man toilets are great!"?
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#756Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mate, if you are proud and happy to code this way, congratulations. That code is an absolute nightmare tho. Your eyes are trained on it so you think this is as good as an ergonomic framework.
How would you refactor it?
Is it some bundled code or those ~4k lines are written just for that case? You don't reuse even your own code?
I would start by organizing the code in a sane and logical way. But that's why I said, if you enjoy coding this way, great.
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not directly, but when you have devs who only know how to build with the framework and don’t have a grip on what’s going on under the hood or how it all interacts in the browser environment (increasingly common), performance is sure to take a hit.
It's not React's fault that people either don't know what they're doing, or don't care enough to make their software performant. This is not a new phenomenon, bad/rushed software has always existed.
GitHub somehow became instantly slow to this day after they started introducing React but I guess it’s just their devs faults
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#758Earlier quoted context omitted.
I humbly disagree. I've never built a highly interactive application with React, only simple sites where the guys before me chose React, so I can't speak to its relative strengths or weaknesses there, but I've found that it doesn't scale down very well to simple sites. For a simple sign-in page, it's easy to just store state in the DOM and use a element to send the credentials, and maybe a little JS for the password…
>I think it's very hard to argue that React is effective or well designed. This is a foolish take. React is the reason the modern web is as usable as it is. Anyone who contests otherwise is simply ignorant of web development history. >(and even Netflix is moving away from React They're not moving away from React, they're doing pure SSR with it. https://react.dev/reference/react-dom/server/renderToPipeabl... You don't…
> This is a foolish take. React is the reason the modern web is as usable as it is
Theres at least one foolish take here Come on think of the 100s of comparable FE frameworks…
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#759Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is probably the wrongest statement. When React was launched, it was one in a pool of thousands of web frameworks. For any axis you want to claim that React won by "default", there was another framework that dominated React in that axis and lost anyways. Some frameworks had more resources and lost (Angular), some of which were more popular and lost (jQuery, Backbone), and some of which were even more hyped t…
Upvoted despite your final sentence being incorrect. :-) You're absolutely right that React is miles better than Angular, but Svelte and Vue (which feel very similar to each other, I just switched from one project written in Svelte to a different project written in Vue and a lot of my knowledge is carrying over) are quite a lot easier than React. When I write in React I have to think about the hooks and when I'm init…
That someone can initialize a state in if block is not something good. React won with Angular 1.0 because noobs abused two-way binding making fking mess everywhere. Now in react they abuse useEffect but it’s a bit easier to control. I work currently in Svelte and never use 2-way binding and are careful to package state mgmt well but I like it. It’s similar to react with mobx but more performant although has no good component libraries. SvelteKit is also generally fine
Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation
#760Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely agree with you. Every time I see yet another template language adding some clumsy for-each loop syntax I sigh. Just let us use a normal programming language. As an example I give you every template system ever invented. Devops tooling is full of them.
Over the years, I've seen a few posts like this that seem to take it as a given that a loop in a normal programming language is better than foreach capability in a template language. Certainly enough times to believe that a significant group of people actually believe it's superior. There's not a difference in capability of expression of the two models. It seems to be a purely aesthetic or comfort difference. I guess…
It's because native programming language will defacto allow you to hack it to its natural limit. A tendency most all programmers have given they even get into programming.
For example with any iterator/loop you may want to filter, or find, or transform. in ruby you have the entire Enumerable API to dig into or Array prototype for js.
a templating language would have to reimplement functionality one by one in an allow list.
it's just fatigue at that point, yet another API i've got to mentally track.
edit: of course if you export the view data "clean" before hand it compels you to not have intense logic in the view. I get that but after a decade+ in product, views are never pure, even just ability to highlight the active tab takes conditional and select logic in a loop.