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I too have been using react professionally for the last 5 years and I have the opposite take on it - I still love it as much as when I started using it. I'm a s
by bavell 7y ago
I too have been using react professionally for the last 5 years and I have the opposite take on it - I still love it as much as when I started using it. I'm a solo dev so I get to control quality end-to-end, perhaps this is where our difference in opinion stems from.
I have no doubt there is tons of awful react code out there written by noobs but the same can be said for practically any software engineering endeavor.
I'll concede that it takes time + effort to understand how to best use react but it's merely a tool and you need experience and insight to understand how best to use your tools. I try to use as little state as possible and use functional components everywhere I can. Hooks have been a big help.
I agree about having reservations with GraphQL, it doesn't seem ready for primetime to me although I'm keeping a close eye on it because I like the underlying concept.
JS is a "huge noobfest" imo because webdev is so accessible and prevalent. But today's noobs are tomorrow's professionals ;) Typescript has been a very welcome development to encourage better dev practices.
- Phillips126 7y ago> I too have been using react professionally for the last 5 years and I have the opposite take on it... I'm with you mostly. When I started React close to 5 years ago it was PAINFUL. Coming from mostly jQuery (single library and I'm on my way) to trying to figure out gulp, bower, webpack, babel, etc. The tooling has much improved with the release of `create-react-app`. I can't exactly say the tooling has become better as much as it has been hidden away and the defaults are mostly ideal. Yesterday I had a huge headache trying to figure out why my treeshaking wasn't working (it was bundling 1.5mb of icons into my app). Turns out I was using an old version of `react-scripts` and with it an older webpack which I may have noticed sooner had I hand-built the tooling like the old days of React. It has become impressively complex with all of the moving parts that are required for a React app these days. Webpack alone is not for the faint of heart with all of the configuration and babel-hell that code (and other files) has to flow through. Without `create-react-app`, I would probably have left React long ago, which would be disappointing because I enjoy the syntax, hooks, readability. I've tried Angular and absolutely hated it, perhaps Svelte would be interesting to me.
- bavell 7y agoI definitely agree the tooling for modern JS can be a huge PITA. Once it's all setup life is great and productivity soars but I completely sympathize with beginners feeling lost and even experienced devs turned off from the opaque complexity.