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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

#851

Post by anticensor »

WickyNilliams wrote: post #539
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.

On keyboards: unironically qwerty probably has slowed innovation. There's no way it is the optimal configuration for typing text. And even less optimal on touch screens. Compare with T9 on old dumb phones - it was new/innovative, and fast, and accurate to such a degree I could type without looking. Shame we lost it tbh

There's layouts like Sholes II, Dvořak, BÉPO, Turkish F that's optimised for speed typing.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#852

Post by bastawhiz »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #713
bastawhiz wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JSX isn't and hasn't even been necessary to use React. The first version of my company's site didn't have a build step and called createElement manually. And in the decade I've been writing for React, I've never used the React compiler. But saying that it's proof that it's not JavaScript it's like saying that V8 is proof that JavaScript is too complicated because otherwise it would be fast enough not to need a JIT. A…

If you also have experience using JSX in a React app, I'd love to hear any opinions/experiences you have with doing the JSX style vs createElement() style coding. I understand how they map to each other but I've only done JSX. That said, I'm old so calling functions all over the place is in my wheelhouse, and I'd love to hear from folks who have done both.

It's verbose, but it's not all that bad for small applications. Especially when you don't want a build step or tooling. In today's day and age, you can have your favorite LLM do the verbose parts for you if you really want.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#853

Post by johnfn »

rmunn wrote: post #369
johnfn wrote: post #37

Earlier 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…

We'd probably have to talk about it IRL; the question you're asking kind of implies you're coming at the whole thing from the wrong direction, and so any answer I give would be unsatisfying unless I could somehow transfer the entire philosophy in my head to you.

The short answer is that what you're asking doesn't really make sense to me. I think of the lifetime of state as analogous to member variables of a class. In the same way that member variables in a class are always visible to the entire class, a state variable in React is always visible to the entire component. You wouldn't want it to be scoped to an if block any more than you'd want a member variable to be scoped to an if block.

Maybe now you're thinking "well, that's limited in an annoying way, and Svelte is better". Maybe. But I suspect for any problem that exists that you think needs conditionally-scoped state, there's a nice clean solution in React. That's what I suspect, anyways. But I very rarely run into problems in React that I can't express in nice, clean code.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#855

Post by danabramov »

pcmaffey wrote: post #700
danabramov wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSC is React’s take on SSG and islands architecture (but deeply composable rather than shallowly).

That makes sense. Too bad it was developed in partnership with Vercel. Deep composability seems to serve their needs—it's not a solution the ecosystem was asking for, at least from my perspective.

You're misinformed. However, you speak with enough conviction that it seems pointless to try to convince you of something else. If you're curious about what it actually is, and the actual historical road towards it, you're welcome to read my blog — for example, https://overreacted.io/jsx-over-the-wire/ is a longread on that topic.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#856

Post by mexicocitinluez »

uzy777 wrote: post #843
mexicocitinluez wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In React, you know for sure that if your reference changes, the component reading that reference as a prop will re-render. Amen. Data flows down. That, to me, is one of React's biggest strengths.

Amen because of this we have useeffect and calling the whole component tree on a isloading change

what? what does what you said have anything to do with what I said? how does "data flowing down" now related to the use effect dependency cycle? are you new to programming?

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#857

Post by pcmaffey »

danabramov wrote: post #855
pcmaffey wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense. Too bad it was developed in partnership with Vercel. Deep composability seems to serve their needs—it's not a solution the ecosystem was asking for, at least from my perspective.

You're misinformed. However, you speak with enough conviction that it seems pointless to try to convince you of something else. If you're curious about what it actually is, and the actual historical road towards it, you're welcome to read my blog — for example, https://overreacted.io/jsx-over-the-wire/ is a longread on that topic.

Hey, I appreciate your writing and the logical development from A to B to RSC. I just don’t think that 95% of react applications care about this use case, or want to introduce the complexity necessary to support it. But history will tell, I could certainly be wrong.

As for the origin story, didn’t Next run an experimental release of RSC way before it was GA in react 19? I don’t want to take anything away from your contributions to it, and if you can tell me that react 19 was not at all shaped by Vercel I’ll accept that. But it goes against the general perception that RSC is heavily supported by Vercel, to feed into their hosting business.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#858

Post by skowron »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #834
skowron wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you a treasure, thank the gods you're here to condescend us plebs.

Claiming something is objectively wrong while stating something that can be refuted with 10 seconds of Googling means you're massaging your own ego at the expense of everyone else's time. Grow up.

You're still condescending. It's unbecoming.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#859

Post by veidelis »

eric-p7 wrote: post #13

This seems like a good place to plug my library, Solarite. It's a minimal, compilation-free JavaScript library that adds reactivity to native web components, as well as scoped styles and a few other ease-of-life features. https://vorticode.github.io/solarite/

Is there a way to connect components similarly like react-redux so that they can access external state without prop drilling? Good job.

Re: React is winning by default and slowing innovation

#860

Post by [deleted] »

komali2 wrote: post #529
actinium226 wrote: post #379

Earlier 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…

> 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. I agree completely, my whole career I've been building webapps, as in like software that really couldn't be server side rendered, such as very interactive charting and table applications or games (that didn't require Canvas and c…

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