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Well, that's like judging a car to be difficult to drive by looking at the listings of all the embedded software in its cpu's. These are details of internal im

by rimliu 9y ago

Well, that's like judging a car to be difficult to drive by looking at the listings of all the embedded software in its cpu's. These are details of internal implementation. The public API which you actually use is very very simple. Calling React "DOM utility" does not sound fair. While one of the major problems it solves—slow DOM operations, I'd say that unidirectional data flow is even more important.

daliwali 9y ago
Your analogy isn't apt, a better analogy would be judging a car to be difficult to maintain by looking at the listings of all the embedded software. I know a guy who restored a 1960's VW Beetle to working condition with minimal expertise, the same couldn't be done for modern cars without a full machine shop that specialized in that make. Fancy selling points like "unidirectional data flow" don't actually mean anything. Each fanboy has their own variant of this, like "transclusions", "immutables", "dependency injection", etc. These are all phrases I've heard that don't translate to tangible results.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  These are all phrases I've heard that don't translate to tangible results. Yeah… but they do translate to tangible results. Using something like React helps to make front-end code simple, scalable, fast, and testable. The car analogy is even worse. A modern vehicle is better than a 60s Beetle by almost every conceivable metric – performance, emissions, safety. In both of these cases, it is preposterous to assume that complexity was introduced for no reason.
  - daliwali 9y ago
    These are marketing buzzwords that can be said about every single web framework, effectively thought-terminating cliches. Every fanboy says their preferred framework is the simplest, fastest, most scalable and most testable. In the car analogy the improved performance of modern cars have more to do with mechanical engineering than software. And the analogy falls apart when you consider that modern web frameworks are invariably slower or roughly equal in performance to its vanilla JS counterpart, but never faster.
    - rimliu 9y ago
      Car analogy was just so say that external API does not necessarily reflect complexity of the implementation. How much of the buzzword is dependency injection you understand when forced to go through entire codebase and replace instantiation of some concrete class with something saner. Not every user of some framework is its fanboy, some just choose based on the value they think particular framework provides. And React is not a framework.
    - matthewmacleod 9y ago
      Every fanboy says their preferred framework is the simplest, fastest, most scalable and most testable. That's a way argument though; just because these are metrics on which frameworks are compared does not mean that there is no comparison possible. In fact, I'd say quite the opposite! And the analogy falls apart when you consider that modern web frameworks are invariably slower or roughly equal in performance to its vanilla JS counterpart, but never faster What are you measuring? I'll bet that React will be a whole bunch faster than whatever DOM reconciliation library you build up from scraps of vanilla JS, in the process creating your own half-implemented framework (because I'm pretty confident that nobody builds an entire application using copy-and-pasted Javascript.) In the car analogy the improved performance of modern cars have more to do with mechanical engineering than software So what? It's irrelevant. Mechanical engineering of a modern car is also much more complex.
      - daliwali 9y ago
        >I'll bet that React will be a whole bunch faster than whatever DOM reconciliation library you build up from scraps of vanilla JS You don't have to bet, you can verify the results yourself. Look here at these benchmarks [0] and compare, Simulacra.js is 22-42% faster than React v15 (depending on whether you also use Redux or MobX). My "scraps of vanilla JS" performs faster! Vanilla without frameworks/libraries is and always will be king of the performance game, though. [0] http://www.stefankrause.net/js-frameworks-benchmark6/webdriver-ts-results/table.html http://www.stefankrause.net/js-frameworks-benchmark6/webdriv...
        9y ago
- rimliu 9y ago
  To me they very much translate to tangible results. Not having them usually translates into mess that is very difficult to untangle.

by rimliu 9y ago

daliwali 9y ago

Your analogy isn't apt, a better analogy would be judging a car to be difficult to maintain by looking at the listings of all the embedded software. I know a guy who restored a 1960's VW Beetle to working condition with minimal expertise, the same couldn't be done for modern cars without a full machine shop that specialized in that make. Fancy selling points like "unidirectional data flow" don't actually mean anything. Each fanboy has their own variant of this, like "transclusions", "immutables", "dependency injection", etc. These are all phrases I've heard that don't translate to tangible results.

matthewmacleod 9y ago
These are all phrases I've heard that don't translate to tangible results. Yeah… but they do translate to tangible results. Using something like React helps to make front-end code simple, scalable, fast, and testable. The car analogy is even worse. A modern vehicle is better than a 60s Beetle by almost every conceivable metric – performance, emissions, safety. In both of these cases, it is preposterous to assume that complexity was introduced for no reason.
- daliwali 9y ago
  These are marketing buzzwords that can be said about every single web framework, effectively thought-terminating cliches. Every fanboy says their preferred framework is the simplest, fastest, most scalable and most testable. In the car analogy the improved performance of modern cars have more to do with mechanical engineering than software. And the analogy falls apart when you consider that modern web frameworks are invariably slower or roughly equal in performance to its vanilla JS counterpart, but never faster.
  - rimliu 9y ago
    Car analogy was just so say that external API does not necessarily reflect complexity of the implementation. How much of the buzzword is dependency injection you understand when forced to go through entire codebase and replace instantiation of some concrete class with something saner. Not every user of some framework is its fanboy, some just choose based on the value they think particular framework provides. And React is not a framework.
  - matthewmacleod 9y ago
    Every fanboy says their preferred framework is the simplest, fastest, most scalable and most testable. That's a way argument though; just because these are metrics on which frameworks are compared does not mean that there is no comparison possible. In fact, I'd say quite the opposite! And the analogy falls apart when you consider that modern web frameworks are invariably slower or roughly equal in performance to its vanilla JS counterpart, but never faster What are you measuring? I'll bet that React will be a whole bunch faster than whatever DOM reconciliation library you build up from scraps of vanilla JS, in the process creating your own half-implemented framework (because I'm pretty confident that nobody builds an entire application using copy-and-pasted Javascript.) In the car analogy the improved performance of modern cars have more to do with mechanical engineering than software So what? It's irrelevant. Mechanical engineering of a modern car is also much more complex.
    - daliwali 9y ago
      >I'll bet that React will be a whole bunch faster than whatever DOM reconciliation library you build up from scraps of vanilla JS You don't have to bet, you can verify the results yourself. Look here at these benchmarks [0] and compare, Simulacra.js is 22-42% faster than React v15 (depending on whether you also use Redux or MobX). My "scraps of vanilla JS" performs faster! Vanilla without frameworks/libraries is and always will be king of the performance game, though. [0] http://www.stefankrause.net/js-frameworks-benchmark6/webdriver-ts-results/table.html http://www.stefankrause.net/js-frameworks-benchmark6/webdriv...
      - 9y ago
rimliu 9y ago
To me they very much translate to tangible results. Not having them usually translates into mess that is very difficult to untangle.