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Given that they also released full and clear documentation _with_ a full and clear tutorial, I have to strongly disagree. They didn't release a library, they re

Given that they also released full and clear documentation _with_ a full and clear tutorial, I have to strongly disagree. They didn't release a library, they released a full framework and methodology that they had been using them selves already for writing huge web application UIs. Releasing it in tiny chunks would have made zero sense. Heck, it speaks to how well written their docs and tutorials were, and how easy it was to pick up, that it became this popular in the first place. After all: React isn't actually a web technology, it's a traditional OOP framework that happens to use the browser as its UI layer. Nothing it does respects how the real webstack works, and makes it impossible to debug "as a web page". Irrespective of how you feel about that part (because I love React as UI framework, but hate how we've told React devs that they're web dev, when they're very much not), the fact that it's stuck around and has become as popular as it now is speaks volumes to how much their release history was just fine.

antris 6y ago
I didn't mean to say that React is bad, quite the opposite! It's a wonderful library and for good reason. But I've never used the OOP parts of it, because I like structuring my applications without a framework, customized to the domain I'm working on. Several mutable classes as a basic structure of an application is a no-go for me. Luckily, you could, can (and in my opinion should) use React without those parts, and the library works just fine as a VDOM engine. Again, Facebook did an incredible job. I'm just commenting on why some people (not me) feel like React is "just another framework oh my god when does this stop". If they released the VDOM engine separately and the framework parts after that, people would understand that you can build your application in a way where you can pop out React and replace it with any other VDOM implementation. Most people don't seem to know this, and that's why they insist on calling it a framework. Also, JSX caused so much confusion among people who were used to template engines. There was a huge opposition to React as a whole simply because JSX looked weird when people were explicitly taught to never mix JS with HTML. React didn't need JSX to work. For my first applications I didn't use it because I didn't want an extra compilation step, and the build/packaging tools back then were quite painful when compared to those of today. I could use React perfectly fine and it did its job in pure JS. JSX to me was just syntactic sugar, but it became a huge red herring to people who were introduced to React.
- maclockard 6y ago
  A different way to think about this is that if Facebook had piecemeal released these new concepts it could have caused _more_ fatigue since it might have felt like an endless parade of new things. This is opposed to releasing it all at once, meaning you could sit down and learn the new things in one go, and apply that knowledge for some time before needing to learn anything else.
tshaddox 6y ago
I get your point, but there’s still plenty of web-related concerns that don’t go away when you’re using React. Many aspects of accessibility, layout and styling, browser compatibility, performance, security, and more are largely unchanged whether you’re developing a React web app or a static HTML+CSS site. Any time you encounter a website where the back button doesn’t work, or with a “link” that works when you click it but can’t be right-clicked to open in a new tab, that’s probably the work of a React dev who falsely believes they are not a web dev!
- TheRealPomax 6y ago
  As someone who's worked with HTML 3.2: people using <a> as button, and button (and before that, input type=button) as link via JS predates React by several decades. As for that last statement: not sure if you're missing words, but when I say someone is not a web dev, I mean they not web devs. They may be devs, and the technologies they use might use part of the web stack, but they're not developing web content, they're developing different content with a completely different event model, a completely different UI methodology, and completely different runtime requirements. Any time you encounter a website where the back button doesn’t work, or with a “link” that works when you click it but can’t be right-clicked to open in a new tab, that’s probably the work of someone who doesn't understand their deployment target well enough to do the right thing, so educate them. Whether that's because they're only used to React, or because they don't realise that web content comes with conventions that they're not adhering to makes no difference. Any time you see broken behaviour, it's because the web stack made that easier than doing the right thing. That's on all of us.
- emteycz 6y ago
  > Any time you encounter a website where the back button doesn’t work, or with a “link” that works when you click it but can’t be right-clicked to open in a new tab, that’s probably the work of a React dev who falsely believes they are not a web dev! Nah, that would probably be another framework, Angular is the usual offender. React-Router handles this perfectly.

antris 6y ago

I didn't mean to say that React is bad, quite the opposite! It's a wonderful library and for good reason. But I've never used the OOP parts of it, because I like structuring my applications without a framework, customized to the domain I'm working on. Several mutable classes as a basic structure of an application is a no-go for me. Luckily, you could, can (and in my opinion should) use React without those parts, and the library works just fine as a VDOM engine. Again, Facebook did an incredible job. I'm just commenting on why some people (not me) feel like React is "just another framework oh my god when does this stop". If they released the VDOM engine separately and the framework parts after that, people would understand that you can build your application in a way where you can pop out React and replace it with any other VDOM implementation. Most people don't seem to know this, and that's why they insist on calling it a framework. Also, JSX caused so much confusion among people who were used to template engines. There was a huge opposition to React as a whole simply because JSX looked weird when people were explicitly taught to never mix JS with HTML. React didn't need JSX to work. For my first applications I didn't use it because I didn't want an extra compilation step, and the build/packaging tools back then were quite painful when compared to those of today. I could use React perfectly fine and it did its job in pure JS. JSX to me was just syntactic sugar, but it became a huge red herring to people who were introduced to React.

maclockard 6y ago
A different way to think about this is that if Facebook had piecemeal released these new concepts it could have caused _more_ fatigue since it might have felt like an endless parade of new things. This is opposed to releasing it all at once, meaning you could sit down and learn the new things in one go, and apply that knowledge for some time before needing to learn anything else.

tshaddox 6y ago

I get your point, but there’s still plenty of web-related concerns that don’t go away when you’re using React. Many aspects of accessibility, layout and styling, browser compatibility, performance, security, and more are largely unchanged whether you’re developing a React web app or a static HTML+CSS site. Any time you encounter a website where the back button doesn’t work, or with a “link” that works when you click it but can’t be right-clicked to open in a new tab, that’s probably the work of a React dev who falsely believes they are not a web dev!

TheRealPomax 6y ago
As someone who's worked with HTML 3.2: people using <a> as button, and button (and before that, input type=button) as link via JS predates React by several decades. As for that last statement: not sure if you're missing words, but when I say someone is not a web dev, I mean they not web devs. They may be devs, and the technologies they use might use part of the web stack, but they're not developing web content, they're developing different content with a completely different event model, a completely different UI methodology, and completely different runtime requirements. Any time you encounter a website where the back button doesn’t work, or with a “link” that works when you click it but can’t be right-clicked to open in a new tab, that’s probably the work of someone who doesn't understand their deployment target well enough to do the right thing, so educate them. Whether that's because they're only used to React, or because they don't realise that web content comes with conventions that they're not adhering to makes no difference. Any time you see broken behaviour, it's because the web stack made that easier than doing the right thing. That's on all of us.
emteycz 6y ago
> Any time you encounter a website where the back button doesn’t work, or with a “link” that works when you click it but can’t be right-clicked to open in a new tab, that’s probably the work of a React dev who falsely believes they are not a web dev! Nah, that would probably be another framework, Angular is the usual offender. React-Router handles this perfectly.