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You certainly have more experience and context than me. But my experience with Redux over the years is there was so many ways to do it leading to a lot of uncer

by city41 6y ago

You certainly have more experience and context than me. But my experience with Redux over the years is there was so many ways to do it leading to a lot of uncertainty. Do you use a switch statement or something like redux-actions? Do you use the duck pattern, where do all these things live in the codebase? What package do you grab for async actions? Are actions 1:1 with DOM events, or are they more like a state machine? How do you compose reducers? Should you compose reducers? I think this led to a lot of confusion and uncertainty with Redux. "I'm using it, but I'm not sure I'm using it effectively." I think a lot of ineffective implementations caused a lot of developers to get a really bad taste. I can unfortunately say at my previous company, just mentioning Redux would make just about every developer cringe. I hated that. But I feel like a lot of what is making Redux more successful these days is the more opinionated releases like the toolkit and the new docs. Since they've only been around about a year now, I think it's reasonable to conclude that before their existence, Redux didn't have a strong opinion a new developer could lean on. It's similar to React, which also tries to avoid opinions. I can appreciate and understand that approach (for both React and Redux), but I do wonder would React be better if there was a stronger opinion on things like CSS, routing, state, etc? I don't mean to criticize. I love Redux and am very grateful for it. This is just how I experienced it over the years.

acemarke 6y ago
I certainly get where you're coming from, and agree that all of the questions you listed are things we didn't express opinions on previously and had to decide for yourself. Still, the bulk of the concerns I've seen over time fall into the categories I've listed - I just really don't remember seeing many comments from folks who were concerned that they "weren't using it effectively" as a particular pain point. Perhaps that was being felt, but expressed in different ways? (I definitely think a lot of people _haven't_ been using it effectively, but didn't necessarily realize it.) In any case, the highly positive response to RTK and the docs work tells me we're headed in the right direction. My next task is to rewrite the existing low-level "Basics/Advanced" tutorial sequence to remove outdated references, show simpler patterns, and improve explanations. I've got my notes on things I want to change here: https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/3855 https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/3855 If you or anyone else has any particular feedback on things you don't like with that existing tutorial or would like to see covered better, please comment and let me know!
crooked-v 6y ago
Having used Redux for some elaborate stuff (in particular, a web app that used a couple of KB of info in Redux to generate an extremely dynamic UI, with diff-style data changes via Websockets inserted in realtime), honestly, the biggest problem I've seen with Redux use is just... people using it for things when they shouldn't. This is most glaring for the whole "do a GET and store it in Redux" thing, where if there's no actual data mutation or derived data or anything else that actually requires or makes use of a global scope, you should just be using a memoized API call function (or a library that abstracts away the common use cases of one, like SWR).
- Udik 6y ago
  So what would be your guesstimate on the percentage of redux uses in the wild that are unnecessary and just introduce complexity or boilerplate instead of providing a benefit?
  - acemarke 6y ago
    FWIW, my current estimates are that roughly 50% of all React apps use Redux. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that maybe 1/3 of those Redux-using apps probably aren't really benefiting from Redux (things like using it _just_ to avoid prop-drilling when you could just use Context, writing reducers that are nothing more than `return action.payload` with no real logic, etc). We've always had an entry in our FAQ section that gives some advice for when it might make sense to put a particular piece of state into Redux vs keeping it in component state. As I rewrite the Redux docs piece by piece, I'm trying to add some additional clarification and emphasis on when you should actually consider using Redux overall.
- deckard1 6y ago
  > people using it for things when they shouldn't I know people that advocate putting everything in redux. They are quite serious about this. Then you end up with reselect everywhere and the whole goddamn universe is memoized. No one seems to know how React renders (or re-renders), so memoize everything! Yes! That's the ticket. The overuse of Redux and the React hook brain damage stems from the tide finally turning against OOP. Haskell did a number on the OOP paradigm. So everyone is afraid of encapsulated state and localized logic. Then you end up with React hooks. Instead of making React's object API better, they choose to make functions worse. So everyone is pretending they are doing functional programming when in reality they are just using functions that are bastardized with this weird flavor of dynamic scoping and all the subtleties of that. But I digress. Today, there are a thousand different ways to do web development wrong and practically no way to do it right. Starting with misconfiguring webpack and working up the stack. It's a true complexity quagmire. But surely there is a SaaS or open source toolkit (with adjacent commercial services!) coming soon to help guide us out of the fog. Just kidding. This hell of ours is by design.
shados 6y ago
Redux was reasonably clear and opinionated early on. People on whom it was forced on, and who disagreed with those opinions, were VERY vocal, and pushed most of the other crap, which fragmented the community and muddied the message. From my point of view as a end user, the only real difference between now and then, is that the vocal minority is now the majority, and they shifted focus to match (which is a good decision). Obviously I can't speak for Mark, but it's how it looks like as an external observer (pun not intended)

by city41 6y ago

acemarke 6y ago

I certainly get where you're coming from, and agree that all of the questions you listed are things we didn't express opinions on previously and had to decide for yourself. Still, the bulk of the concerns I've seen over time fall into the categories I've listed - I just really don't remember seeing many comments from folks who were concerned that they "weren't using it effectively" as a particular pain point. Perhaps that was being felt, but expressed in different ways? (I definitely think a lot of people _haven't_ been using it effectively, but didn't necessarily realize it.) In any case, the highly positive response to RTK and the docs work tells me we're headed in the right direction. My next task is to rewrite the existing low-level "Basics/Advanced" tutorial sequence to remove outdated references, show simpler patterns, and improve explanations. I've got my notes on things I want to change here: https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/3855 https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/3855 If you or anyone else has any particular feedback on things you don't like with that existing tutorial or would like to see covered better, please comment and let me know!

crooked-v 6y ago

Having used Redux for some elaborate stuff (in particular, a web app that used a couple of KB of info in Redux to generate an extremely dynamic UI, with diff-style data changes via Websockets inserted in realtime), honestly, the biggest problem I've seen with Redux use is just... people using it for things when they shouldn't. This is most glaring for the whole "do a GET and store it in Redux" thing, where if there's no actual data mutation or derived data or anything else that actually requires or makes use of a global scope, you should just be using a memoized API call function (or a library that abstracts away the common use cases of one, like SWR).

Udik 6y ago
So what would be your guesstimate on the percentage of redux uses in the wild that are unnecessary and just introduce complexity or boilerplate instead of providing a benefit?
- acemarke 6y ago
  FWIW, my current estimates are that roughly 50% of all React apps use Redux. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that maybe 1/3 of those Redux-using apps probably aren't really benefiting from Redux (things like using it _just_ to avoid prop-drilling when you could just use Context, writing reducers that are nothing more than `return action.payload` with no real logic, etc). We've always had an entry in our FAQ section that gives some advice for when it might make sense to put a particular piece of state into Redux vs keeping it in component state. As I rewrite the Redux docs piece by piece, I'm trying to add some additional clarification and emphasis on when you should actually consider using Redux overall.
deckard1 6y ago
> people using it for things when they shouldn't I know people that advocate putting everything in redux. They are quite serious about this. Then you end up with reselect everywhere and the whole goddamn universe is memoized. No one seems to know how React renders (or re-renders), so memoize everything! Yes! That's the ticket. The overuse of Redux and the React hook brain damage stems from the tide finally turning against OOP. Haskell did a number on the OOP paradigm. So everyone is afraid of encapsulated state and localized logic. Then you end up with React hooks. Instead of making React's object API better, they choose to make functions worse. So everyone is pretending they are doing functional programming when in reality they are just using functions that are bastardized with this weird flavor of dynamic scoping and all the subtleties of that. But I digress. Today, there are a thousand different ways to do web development wrong and practically no way to do it right. Starting with misconfiguring webpack and working up the stack. It's a true complexity quagmire. But surely there is a SaaS or open source toolkit (with adjacent commercial services!) coming soon to help guide us out of the fog. Just kidding. This hell of ours is by design.

shados 6y ago

Redux was reasonably clear and opinionated early on. People on whom it was forced on, and who disagreed with those opinions, were VERY vocal, and pushed most of the other crap, which fragmented the community and muddied the message. From my point of view as a end user, the only real difference between now and then, is that the vocal minority is now the majority, and they shifted focus to match (which is a good decision). Obviously I can't speak for Mark, but it's how it looks like as an external observer (pun not intended)