the stack has to be backwards crap for GUI programming, right? Right, please dont take my praise for react as an endorment that the state of the industry is wh

the stack has to be backwards crap for GUI programming, right? Right, please dont take my praise for react as an endorment that the state of the industry is where we need to be. Rather I see it was a step forward. For a little background I have been in the business since Tim Lee published his first page of what would become the WWW. I would venture to say the first webpage I wrote was in the first 100 and if not, certainly within the first 1000 pages developed. Before that I was a typical desktop developer (though I was young, so that career was short lived). Anyways, the reson I bring up my background is to make the following observation and that is, from the implementation of the common gateway specification I always felt like the web took a wrong turn. Not that we should not have an internet enabled application spec but rather we tacked it on to a distributed document specification. That being said, we tried and tried to build the "web" for applications but none of them won. Meanwhile, hackers continued to deliver applications via web pages, through ingenious hacks to the HTTP spec, CGI, and Javascript everything else floundered with the exception of Flash and that was killed by Apple (as well as it's abuse on web pages) and lack of open spec until to late. So that brings us to where we are, the worst possible app UI technology won by attrition. The people building that technology spent a generation building entire UI's and then dumping them down to the client. When we finally broke ourselves free of the dumb client model, that style of development persisted as it was pervasive. Many attempts have been made to free web devs from that mindset with some pretty good frameworks (good in web measurement) but the build everything in one big controller mentality has been pervasive. React has been one of the first frameworks to free web developers minds of that model yet there continues to be efforts to go back Vue is one of those efforts. The reality is it takes more thought to think about a UI as reactive components that react to change as it's easier (in the beginning) to write procedural code in a monolithic controller and if a framework allows it that is where developers will default back to. Which in my opinion is a step in the wrong direction. I have seen web developers almost get several times and it seems we always regress back to controller based thinking the first to set it back was Backbone and the second was Angular. React is certainly not the state of the art in UI programming, but it is the state of the art in web UI programming and knowing where we came from I am happy for that.