6 ms·

I have a problem with React and spend a lot of time talking to my therapist

38 points by thomasbibby 7y ago

alessioalex 7y ago
> Mobile devices simply don't have the CPU and memory to cope well with client-side JS apps. I think they do, but most client-side JS apps are horribly designed. They load the whole bundle at once, display ads, have setTimeouts and other unnecessary things that add to the bloat. Native apps aren't great either, I hate the Twitter and Reddit ones, they constantly fail to load stuff, block and restart.
- _def 7y ago
  > They load the whole bundle at once [...] Isn't this a good thing? Genuinely asking.
  - alessioalex 7y ago
    It depends. If I'm never planning on visiting the "live dashboard" of some website then all the extra code that is loaded for that feature is useless to me. That's why separate bundles exists (with browserify, webpack etc).
machinecontrol 7y ago
Serious, not intended to flame bait question: Why is race/gender featured so prominently in this technical post? Would it be appropriate to open a post with “black men in tech had a twitter meltdown”?
- thecatspaw 7y ago
  I was wondering that as well. However I am not sure I would call it a technical post. To me it reads more like the rant of a person who hates react because it was written by facebook.
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    Another issue is that there is a much more serious and extensive history of value judgements about "black" people, rather than about "white" people. At least in the US there never was widespread slavery of white people because they are white, or widespread ideas of white skin color being associated with lesser intelligence, culture or whatever. It is, however, very important not to get hung up in racist terminology. For example it only serves the racists' cause to argue who is actually black or who is actually white, or how much of each. It's not like the average heckler on the street asks somebody where he is from, his religion, what he is doing for a living or what his ancestral gene mixture is!
    - spraak 7y ago
      > For example it only serves the racists' cause to argue who is actually black or who is actually white, or how much of each. When you're treated better the lighter/whiter you are, then it makes sense why people would argue about it
      - bayesian_horse 7y ago
        It makes sense for people who think they can benefit from that racism, therefor serving the racist cause.
    - mieseratte 7y ago
      How about this: value judgements based on race are bad. Full Stop. I will never understand this mindset that racism is only a problem if there is some nasty history involved.
      - bayesian_horse 7y ago
        Nasty history is quite often the difference between a racist value judgement and a relatively innocent statement about people. Racists can often behind ignoring that distinction. It's called a dog-whistle.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  One difference is that "black men in tech" are a minority with a lot of discriminatory experiences. Criticizing a minority you don't belong to for complaining too much is something different than criticizing the majority you do belong to for the same thing. I don't know about "react-gate" yet, but I'm sure to find out in a few minutes.
  - spraak 7y ago
    I don't find anything inflammatory about what you said and yet your comment is very grey.
    - bayesian_horse 7y ago
      Certain people know that if they voiced their opinions, they would get an immensely negative reaction. Downvotes, however, are not moderated...
- coldtea 7y ago
  Because it's fashionable and scores you some points... If the inverse became fashionable in 10 years, the same kind of people (if not the same people) would do a 180o.
  - azhu 7y ago
    The nature of progress is movement relative to the position currently being held. I bet you're right that a lot of people are just thoughtlessly bandwagoning, but I bet the blanket dismissal of progressive attitudes also misses a lot of people who are thoughtfully deciding where to go from here.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      My point though was not about the progressive attitudes, as much as about the ridiculous excess ("guys" being offensive, etc). In a decade or so these would be viewed the same way most people viewed hippies after the 70s...
- azhu 7y ago
  Because for some, race/gender is a primary factor in how they experience being a developer. I believe that is the fundamental point the article is making -- that the reasons why React is what it is today are not necessarily objective and totally sound but rather significantly influenced by what ideas and interests were already in the population at the cost of other ideas that may require more of a leap from the mainstream to fully understand but may also be better overall. It would not be appropriate to post with the title “black men in tech had a twitter meltdown” but it is at least this okay with white dudes for the same reason why it's fine to make fun of The Mountain if he can't hit a squat in the gym but it's not fine to make fun of your buddy who's trying to make a change in his life. Of course how much better The Mountain is than your buddy at lifting heavy stuff is probably a larger discrepancy than the gap between white men and and minority women's abilities to affect the course of the developer landscape but that's the mechanism.
  - thatswrong0 7y ago
    Just like this whole drama, this attitude (I don’t like my gender and race being the focus of things, therefore I’m going to do it to you) seems counter-productive to the cause of inclusion and diversity.
bayesian_horse 7y ago
I still think React is a wonderful library and feels like a more natural way to express a dynamic web page. Other frameworks get into your face a lot more. It does seem like a lot of the grievances in this post are about arbitrary choices by the author or the teams using React as part of their stack. Maybe I'm not attached enough to React that I can understand the problem.
GrumpyNl 7y ago
Despite the race / gender notions, the rant is very recognizable.
k__ 7y ago
Someone wrongly accused a well known React dev of being a white supremacist for things that didn't happen. Now people are, rightfully, angered about the false accusations, but the accusers use this to say "see, we said you are toxic!" Guess we gonna have fallout from this bullshit a long time...
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  It seems like the well known React developer has a somewhat more ... illustrous ... history of questionable behavior, so while he may not be an actually white supremacist, he does seem to fit a certain toxic mold. On the other hand, the mentioned female developer has probably had quite a lot of such experiences with direct and indirect racism, perceived or actual, but either she kept quiet or it didn't blow up that much.
  - sweeneyrod 7y ago
    Are you referring to the behaviour described here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g4oh2GGZOsucZfT1YJ5wjDUSk3ntbM3RNAxVs528-NM/preview https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g4oh2GGZOsucZfT1YJ5wjDUS... (for instance using the words "guys", "stupid" and "crazy") or something else?
    - __exit__ 7y ago
      What's the source of that document? I found a page[0] with more info and link references to multiple sources that seems to explain everything in detail. [0]: https://dev.to/aryanjnyc/ken-wheeler-and-dan-abramov-deactivate-their-twitter-accounts-302 https://dev.to/aryanjnyc/ken-wheeler-and-dan-abramov-deactiv...
      - sweeneyrod 7y ago
        The last Tweet in the article you link
      - k__ 7y ago
        Interesting that the Vue devs are the source of this.
have_faith 7y ago
> The popularity of React is fueled by corporate-sponsorship, a tech industry seeking validation by becoming Hard and Masculine, and aggressive Capitalist principles Uh, huh.
mezi 7y ago
What is this madness? Is this a tech article? Is this what good content looks like on the internet? Is React racist? Do people simply spend too much time on twitter? I have so many questions and hope to never have to answer any of them.
viburnum 7y ago
The last two projects I worked on that used React, it was pretty obvious that there it served no purpose other than to make webdev into “hard” software engineering. Even the tiniest design changes required expensive software devs to implement them. Good for me but it cost the client a fortune.
layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
Can somebody give me a quick rundown on this react-gate?
- k__ 7y ago
  Someone talked to someone else. The first person misunderstood the second. The first person started accusing a well know React dev of being a white supremacist on Twitter because of that misunderstanding. People who care about social justice rallied to the first persons cause, saying React would protect white supremacists. React devs didn't know anything about the accused dev being a WS, because he wasn't one. It got all cleared up that the dev was wrongly accused and the accuser publicly apologized. React devs got angry that people who care about social justice can run around and ruin peoples lifes with false accusations.
blacksoil 7y ago
Although there are lots of cases where React is overused, for example in mostly-static pages that don't really benefit from automated state bindings, there are situations when React is nice. I just recently came back to Android development scene, and React Native actually makes it super easy to do simple Android dev. While it couldn't be used in all use-cases, for prototyping and getting simple things done quickly, it seems like a pretty promising technology.
quantummkv 7y ago
> In classic fashion, the most privileged 1% of developers (as in those with the most free time - young, white, able-bodied men) saw the newly released React and fell over themselves to be in on The Latest Interesting Technology. I am a brown guy in a 3rd world country who has been using react for long enough to be an early adopter. Reading this suddenly transformed me into a 6.6ft, white skinned, blue eyed Aryan wet dream. > The concept of "We Live In A Meritocracy" becomes firmly implanted in the community. > We reach today, where two prominent React community leaders quit Twitter rather than deal with accusations of emerging white nationalism and machismo-fueled poor behavior. > The popularity of React is fueled by corporate-sponsorship, a tech industry seeking validation by becoming Hard and Masculine, and aggressive Capitalist principles (validation through work, market dominance, a continuous supply of skilled Labor) that result in Things being placed before People. This is next level satire, right? right? Or at least something generated by an AI bot fuelled by China/Russia/Ghost of USSR. And the comments below the article take the cake. I have seen better comments on threads in /b/
- p0nies 7y ago
  Generated by a few too many Xanax more likely.
- azhu 7y ago
  Being brown in a white place is a different experience than being brown in a brown place. There is a lot of friction when different enough groups coexist. If you've ever found yourself in maybe a job or something where you thought differently enough from the people around you to feel like they were more interested in just maintaining their bubble of how they understand the world than discovering the best way to be, it's that same mechanism in action. Just it's blown up to much larger proportions since it's not just you differing with people who share your race, culture, ideas about how society should function, etc.
ramblerman 7y ago
> So, Reactgate has become a thing. What's been fomenting for a while blew up last week, with two prominent White Men In Tech having little tantrum Twitter breaks, and a wonderful woman of colour working as a dev/designer feeling she is no longer welcome in our industry and planning to leave as soon as it's financially possible. God. Its so creepy casually stereotyping people by their race and gender in this manner. Ironically it’s always from so called social justice moralists. It reminds me of the Stephen fry quote about the church and sex. > It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly; because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic Church in a nutshell. These blog authors seem to have an analogous obsession with gender and race.
- azhu 7y ago
  While I agree with you that it's problematic, a minority woman stereotyping a white man is not quite the same as in reverse if you see relative social positioning as a first class factor. The reasoning for why it's different is something like the reasoning for why it's generally fine for employees to get together and casually bond over being annoyed by their bosses but the same thing going the other way would be obviously inappropriate. A lot of people experience being of minority race, gender, and culture as constructs that basically equate to having been born holding the short end of an implicit employee-boss relationship. As such, it's something that's naturally at the forefront of their minds.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
flippinburgers 7y ago
This is not a tech article and shouldn't be listed. I read the summary of twitter remarks and am constantly amazed by how sensitive people appear to be. ... I should have left it alone as soon as I saw the comments about capitalism being shit and intersectionalism being a real thing.
- thomasbibby 7y ago
  I thought it offered some valid technical criticisms of React: specifically that it's over engineered and it results in a bad user experience, especially on mobile. I thought the article offered an interesting argument that front end development has suffered from increasing over-engineering in the last decade, and this over-engineering can be explained by cultural factors and the influence of large corporations like Facebook.
  - thecatspaw 7y ago
    That would be fair critic points. Unfortunately the post gets overshadowed by the authors personal opinions
viach 7y ago
"React" and "white supremacist" words in a single blog post won't deliver any good kind of discussion imho)

38 points by thomasbibby 7y ago

> Mobile devices simply don't have the CPU and memory to cope well with client-side JS apps. I think they do, but most client-side JS apps are horribly designed. They load the whole bundle at once, display ads, have setTimeouts and other unnecessary things that add to the bloat. Native apps aren't great either, I hate the Twitter and Reddit ones, they constantly fail to load stuff, block and restart.

_def 7y ago
> They load the whole bundle at once [...] Isn't this a good thing? Genuinely asking.
- alessioalex 7y ago
  It depends. If I'm never planning on visiting the "live dashboard" of some website then all the extra code that is loaded for that feature is useless to me. That's why separate bundles exists (with browserify, webpack etc).

machinecontrol 7y ago

Serious, not intended to flame bait question: Why is race/gender featured so prominently in this technical post? Would it be appropriate to open a post with “black men in tech had a twitter meltdown”?

thecatspaw 7y ago
I was wondering that as well. However I am not sure I would call it a technical post. To me it reads more like the rant of a person who hates react because it was written by facebook.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  Another issue is that there is a much more serious and extensive history of value judgements about "black" people, rather than about "white" people. At least in the US there never was widespread slavery of white people because they are white, or widespread ideas of white skin color being associated with lesser intelligence, culture or whatever. It is, however, very important not to get hung up in racist terminology. For example it only serves the racists' cause to argue who is actually black or who is actually white, or how much of each. It's not like the average heckler on the street asks somebody where he is from, his religion, what he is doing for a living or what his ancestral gene mixture is!
  - spraak 7y ago
    > For example it only serves the racists' cause to argue who is actually black or who is actually white, or how much of each. When you're treated better the lighter/whiter you are, then it makes sense why people would argue about it
    - bayesian_horse 7y ago
      It makes sense for people who think they can benefit from that racism, therefor serving the racist cause.
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    How about this: value judgements based on race are bad. Full Stop. I will never understand this mindset that racism is only a problem if there is some nasty history involved.
    - bayesian_horse 7y ago
      Nasty history is quite often the difference between a racist value judgement and a relatively innocent statement about people. Racists can often behind ignoring that distinction. It's called a dog-whistle.
bayesian_horse 7y ago
One difference is that "black men in tech" are a minority with a lot of discriminatory experiences. Criticizing a minority you don't belong to for complaining too much is something different than criticizing the majority you do belong to for the same thing. I don't know about "react-gate" yet, but I'm sure to find out in a few minutes.
- spraak 7y ago
  I don't find anything inflammatory about what you said and yet your comment is very grey.
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    Certain people know that if they voiced their opinions, they would get an immensely negative reaction. Downvotes, however, are not moderated...
coldtea 7y ago
Because it's fashionable and scores you some points... If the inverse became fashionable in 10 years, the same kind of people (if not the same people) would do a 180o.
- azhu 7y ago
  The nature of progress is movement relative to the position currently being held. I bet you're right that a lot of people are just thoughtlessly bandwagoning, but I bet the blanket dismissal of progressive attitudes also misses a lot of people who are thoughtfully deciding where to go from here.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    My point though was not about the progressive attitudes, as much as about the ridiculous excess ("guys" being offensive, etc). In a decade or so these would be viewed the same way most people viewed hippies after the 70s...
azhu 7y ago
Because for some, race/gender is a primary factor in how they experience being a developer. I believe that is the fundamental point the article is making -- that the reasons why React is what it is today are not necessarily objective and totally sound but rather significantly influenced by what ideas and interests were already in the population at the cost of other ideas that may require more of a leap from the mainstream to fully understand but may also be better overall. It would not be appropriate to post with the title “black men in tech had a twitter meltdown” but it is at least this okay with white dudes for the same reason why it's fine to make fun of The Mountain if he can't hit a squat in the gym but it's not fine to make fun of your buddy who's trying to make a change in his life. Of course how much better The Mountain is than your buddy at lifting heavy stuff is probably a larger discrepancy than the gap between white men and and minority women's abilities to affect the course of the developer landscape but that's the mechanism.
- thatswrong0 7y ago
  Just like this whole drama, this attitude (I don’t like my gender and race being the focus of things, therefore I’m going to do it to you) seems counter-productive to the cause of inclusion and diversity.

bayesian_horse 7y ago

I still think React is a wonderful library and feels like a more natural way to express a dynamic web page. Other frameworks get into your face a lot more. It does seem like a lot of the grievances in this post are about arbitrary choices by the author or the teams using React as part of their stack. Maybe I'm not attached enough to React that I can understand the problem.

GrumpyNl 7y ago

Despite the race / gender notions, the rant is very recognizable.

k__ 7y ago

Someone wrongly accused a well known React dev of being a white supremacist for things that didn't happen. Now people are, rightfully, angered about the false accusations, but the accusers use this to say "see, we said you are toxic!" Guess we gonna have fallout from this bullshit a long time...

bayesian_horse 7y ago
It seems like the well known React developer has a somewhat more ... illustrous ... history of questionable behavior, so while he may not be an actually white supremacist, he does seem to fit a certain toxic mold. On the other hand, the mentioned female developer has probably had quite a lot of such experiences with direct and indirect racism, perceived or actual, but either she kept quiet or it didn't blow up that much.
- sweeneyrod 7y ago
  Are you referring to the behaviour described here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g4oh2GGZOsucZfT1YJ5wjDUSk3ntbM3RNAxVs528-NM/preview https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g4oh2GGZOsucZfT1YJ5wjDUS... (for instance using the words "guys", "stupid" and "crazy") or something else?
  - __exit__ 7y ago
    What's the source of that document? I found a page[0] with more info and link references to multiple sources that seems to explain everything in detail. [0]: https://dev.to/aryanjnyc/ken-wheeler-and-dan-abramov-deactivate-their-twitter-accounts-302 https://dev.to/aryanjnyc/ken-wheeler-and-dan-abramov-deactiv...
    - sweeneyrod 7y ago
      The last Tweet in the article you link
    - k__ 7y ago
      Interesting that the Vue devs are the source of this.

have_faith 7y ago

> The popularity of React is fueled by corporate-sponsorship, a tech industry seeking validation by becoming Hard and Masculine, and aggressive Capitalist principles Uh, huh.

mezi 7y ago

What is this madness? Is this a tech article? Is this what good content looks like on the internet? Is React racist? Do people simply spend too much time on twitter? I have so many questions and hope to never have to answer any of them.

viburnum 7y ago

The last two projects I worked on that used React, it was pretty obvious that there it served no purpose other than to make webdev into “hard” software engineering. Even the tiniest design changes required expensive software devs to implement them. Good for me but it cost the client a fortune.

layoutIfNeeded 7y ago

Can somebody give me a quick rundown on this react-gate?

k__ 7y ago
Someone talked to someone else. The first person misunderstood the second. The first person started accusing a well know React dev of being a white supremacist on Twitter because of that misunderstanding. People who care about social justice rallied to the first persons cause, saying React would protect white supremacists. React devs didn't know anything about the accused dev being a WS, because he wasn't one. It got all cleared up that the dev was wrongly accused and the accuser publicly apologized. React devs got angry that people who care about social justice can run around and ruin peoples lifes with false accusations.

blacksoil 7y ago

Although there are lots of cases where React is overused, for example in mostly-static pages that don't really benefit from automated state bindings, there are situations when React is nice. I just recently came back to Android development scene, and React Native actually makes it super easy to do simple Android dev. While it couldn't be used in all use-cases, for prototyping and getting simple things done quickly, it seems like a pretty promising technology.

quantummkv 7y ago

> In classic fashion, the most privileged 1% of developers (as in those with the most free time - young, white, able-bodied men) saw the newly released React and fell over themselves to be in on The Latest Interesting Technology. I am a brown guy in a 3rd world country who has been using react for long enough to be an early adopter. Reading this suddenly transformed me into a 6.6ft, white skinned, blue eyed Aryan wet dream. > The concept of "We Live In A Meritocracy" becomes firmly implanted in the community. > We reach today, where two prominent React community leaders quit Twitter rather than deal with accusations of emerging white nationalism and machismo-fueled poor behavior. > The popularity of React is fueled by corporate-sponsorship, a tech industry seeking validation by becoming Hard and Masculine, and aggressive Capitalist principles (validation through work, market dominance, a continuous supply of skilled Labor) that result in Things being placed before People. This is next level satire, right? right? Or at least something generated by an AI bot fuelled by China/Russia/Ghost of USSR. And the comments below the article take the cake. I have seen better comments on threads in /b/

p0nies 7y ago
Generated by a few too many Xanax more likely.
azhu 7y ago
Being brown in a white place is a different experience than being brown in a brown place. There is a lot of friction when different enough groups coexist. If you've ever found yourself in maybe a job or something where you thought differently enough from the people around you to feel like they were more interested in just maintaining their bubble of how they understand the world than discovering the best way to be, it's that same mechanism in action. Just it's blown up to much larger proportions since it's not just you differing with people who share your race, culture, ideas about how society should function, etc.

ramblerman 7y ago

> So, Reactgate has become a thing. What's been fomenting for a while blew up last week, with two prominent White Men In Tech having little tantrum Twitter breaks, and a wonderful woman of colour working as a dev/designer feeling she is no longer welcome in our industry and planning to leave as soon as it's financially possible. God. Its so creepy casually stereotyping people by their race and gender in this manner. Ironically it’s always from so called social justice moralists. It reminds me of the Stephen fry quote about the church and sex. > It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly; because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic Church in a nutshell. These blog authors seem to have an analogous obsession with gender and race.

azhu 7y ago
While I agree with you that it's problematic, a minority woman stereotyping a white man is not quite the same as in reverse if you see relative social positioning as a first class factor. The reasoning for why it's different is something like the reasoning for why it's generally fine for employees to get together and casually bond over being annoyed by their bosses but the same thing going the other way would be obviously inappropriate. A lot of people experience being of minority race, gender, and culture as constructs that basically equate to having been born holding the short end of an implicit employee-boss relationship. As such, it's something that's naturally at the forefront of their minds.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

flippinburgers 7y ago

This is not a tech article and shouldn't be listed. I read the summary of twitter remarks and am constantly amazed by how sensitive people appear to be. ... I should have left it alone as soon as I saw the comments about capitalism being shit and intersectionalism being a real thing.

thomasbibby 7y ago
I thought it offered some valid technical criticisms of React: specifically that it's over engineered and it results in a bad user experience, especially on mobile. I thought the article offered an interesting argument that front end development has suffered from increasing over-engineering in the last decade, and this over-engineering can be explained by cultural factors and the influence of large corporations like Facebook.
- thecatspaw 7y ago
  That would be fair critic points. Unfortunately the post gets overshadowed by the authors personal opinions

viach 7y ago

"React" and "white supremacist" words in a single blog post won't deliver any good kind of discussion imho)