4 ms·

React made a lot of sense to escape Angular, Ember, Backbone and jQuery in 2013-2014, but then it took 4-5 years to become wildly popular [1]. I've never unders

by pier25 6y ago

React made a lot of sense to escape Angular, Ember, Backbone and jQuery in 2013-2014, but then it took 4-5 years to become wildly popular [1]. I've never understood its popularity despite the fact that during those years there were already better options out there by any metric you can think of (except popularity and hype). - Inferno and Preact: similar API but so much faster and smaller. - Mithril: vdom based with components, faster than React and includes http client + router in 10kB gzipped. - Vue: faster and smaller and has official batteries (unlike react-router which is a third party) Etc. [1] https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=react&from=2013-05-30&to=2020-05-30 https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=react&from=2013-05-...

cutler 6y ago
One-way data binding is what made React successful. Angular took a long time playing catch-up and with Vue it was optional.
srg0 6y ago
Probably because none of those advantages of other solutions matter for small-to-medium scale business. It's about getting things done _fast_, not getting the fastest thing. And for that purpose, a popular tool is usually better (more people, more information, bigger ecosystem). As for the technical merits of the alternatives, they fail to manifest in most situations: "Faster" - any framework is fast enough for most of the common tasks; and even if a popular framework is not the fastest, it is not necessarily a bottleneck in the real life applications. "Smaller" - it is just "faster" download. Irrelevant in many usage scenarios. It might be important in some applications, but shaving milliseconds vs man-months is a tough sale. "Official batteries" - bundling of the dependencies is completely irrelevant from the business perspective. It's something that the developers are paid to figure out.
- pier25 6y ago
  > but shaving milliseconds vs man-months is a tough sale It's not really one or the other. Both Preact and Inferno can be used with React libraries with a compat layer. > bundling of the dependencies is completely irrelevant from the business perspective. It's not irrelevant. Vue is used by major corps in China. > It's something that the developers are paid to figure out. Didn't you just argue that the advantage of React is that developers get "things done _fast_"? How come this is not an advantage in the case of Vue?
  - srg0 6y ago
    > Vue is used by major corps in China It might be the case that in China Vue is the default and the most popular choice. And still my point holds: Vue is not the fastest, and is not the smallest framework. Technical merits alone ("faster", "smaller") are not enough to drive adoption. On bundling/unbundling. I think it's a preference thing. "Batteries included" vs "modular" are both viable designs.
    - pier25 6y ago
      Since you're claiming the answer is not technical, why would Vue be more popular in China than React and why isn't Vue more popular in the Western world? > I think it's a preference thing. "Batteries included" vs "modular" are both viable designs. Again, it's not one or the other. Vue in itself is just a simple rendering engine much like React, Inferno, etc. There are official libraries (router, state, etc) but those are separate projects which you can choose to use or not. It's not a framework like Angular, Ember, etc.

by pier25 6y ago

cutler 6y ago

One-way data binding is what made React successful. Angular took a long time playing catch-up and with Vue it was optional.

srg0 6y ago

Probably because none of those advantages of other solutions matter for small-to-medium scale business. It's about getting things done _fast_, not getting the fastest thing. And for that purpose, a popular tool is usually better (more people, more information, bigger ecosystem). As for the technical merits of the alternatives, they fail to manifest in most situations: "Faster" - any framework is fast enough for most of the common tasks; and even if a popular framework is not the fastest, it is not necessarily a bottleneck in the real life applications. "Smaller" - it is just "faster" download. Irrelevant in many usage scenarios. It might be important in some applications, but shaving milliseconds vs man-months is a tough sale. "Official batteries" - bundling of the dependencies is completely irrelevant from the business perspective. It's something that the developers are paid to figure out.

pier25 6y ago
> but shaving milliseconds vs man-months is a tough sale It's not really one or the other. Both Preact and Inferno can be used with React libraries with a compat layer. > bundling of the dependencies is completely irrelevant from the business perspective. It's not irrelevant. Vue is used by major corps in China. > It's something that the developers are paid to figure out. Didn't you just argue that the advantage of React is that developers get "things done _fast_"? How come this is not an advantage in the case of Vue?
- srg0 6y ago
  > Vue is used by major corps in China It might be the case that in China Vue is the default and the most popular choice. And still my point holds: Vue is not the fastest, and is not the smallest framework. Technical merits alone ("faster", "smaller") are not enough to drive adoption. On bundling/unbundling. I think it's a preference thing. "Batteries included" vs "modular" are both viable designs.
  - pier25 6y ago
    Since you're claiming the answer is not technical, why would Vue be more popular in China than React and why isn't Vue more popular in the Western world? > I think it's a preference thing. "Batteries included" vs "modular" are both viable designs. Again, it's not one or the other. Vue in itself is just a simple rendering engine much like React, Inferno, etc. There are official libraries (router, state, etc) but those are separate projects which you can choose to use or not. It's not a framework like Angular, Ember, etc.