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God I hate redux. I hate that it got chosen as the de facto solution, and that there was such a strong push for it as the main state management solution for r

God I hate redux. I hate that it got chosen as the de facto solution, and that there was such a strong push for it as the main state management solution for react. Even though redux devs themselves have come out and said that it's not for every situation. Where does that leave people? I really think there should be a greater focus to be more ergonomic rather than theoretically good. There should be one package that someone can just jump into. Separating react-redux, redux, and now redux-tookit is just frustrating. I just get this gut feeling with redux that people just wrote and wrote stuff, without really stopping and squashing it down. The fact that part of the messaging with using a toolkit also involves reading up on the essentials is a problem. Even if the problem space is very complex there shouldn't be this much information - I think it might be easier to learn some programming languages than the entirety of the redux ecosystem. And frankly, I don't even think the problem is that complicated, the basic flux model isn't that complicated. And yet it's been made to be so complicated. I recently did a refresher, and on the react-redux example, just in the intro of a basic todolist, there's ~50 things that are highlighted - implying you should remember them - in just the section of setting up a store. Not the entire section on stores, just the intro outlining the brief overview of the rest of the tutorial. There is just so much stuff. I don't even think the toolkit makes things that much simpler either. It's a step in the right direction, but it feels really leaky when I get into the intermediate and advanced sections.

acemarke 6y ago
Sorry to hear that :( I get what some of what you're saying here, but I also feel a couple of these complaints are misguided. For one thing, the Redux team has never intentionally tried to make Redux "the main state management tool for React". We've never deliberately sold it that way, and goodness knows the React team has said "React is the only official state management tool for React". Redux got popular because it solved the problems people were dealing with when it came out, better than the existing tools in the ecosystem, at a time when React was taking off. We've done our best to clarify in the docs when it does actually make sense to use Redux. Redux Toolkit is still Redux. You're still writing reducers, creating a store, dispatching actions, and updating the UI based on state. RTK just allows you to do so with less code. So, the "Essentials" tutorial starts by introducing those terms, concepts, and data flow, because you need to understand those regardless of how you're writing Redux logic. While Redux _is_ normally used with React, it's also UI-agnostic, hence the separation from React-Redux, and using it with other UI frameworks is a valid use case that we support. We had some long debates about whether to add these additional APIs into the Redux core [0] [1], and concluded that there was too much inertia around the existing Redux ecosystem to build those into the core `redux` package. As it is, even though RTK isn't required, we've had folks say they didn't like some of the opinions we've built into RTK (like using Immer for writing reducers). So, combining all three of those packages into a single super-package is not feasible at this point. I've tossed around the idea of trying to merge the Redux core, React-Redux, and RTK docs into one site, but that would likely require merging all three libs into a monorepo. Not impossible, but not something that's likely to happen any time soon, if only because my own time is very limited and I have a lot of other docs work I need to focus on [2]. Which specific docs page are you referring to? You said "intermediate" and "advanced" - sounds like you're referring to the RTK docs site tutorials [3]? FWIW, I wrote those a year ago, and at the time the main Redux docs were frankly very out of date. I've spent much of this year rewriting the Redux core tutorials, as listed above, and those Redux tutorials are where I would direct anyone who's new to Redux or really wants to know about RTK. We do also have an open issue to discuss what tutorial content should be on the RTK docs site [4], and tbh I'm really not sure _what_ tutorial content should actually be on the RTK site now that the "Essentials" and "Fundamentals" tutorials exist in the core docs. You're right that the actual Redux core itself isn't very complicated, but the biggest issue is trying to teach people to "think in Redux". In fact, it's kind of _because_ the core is so small that there's a lot of documentation needed - so much of this is actually in the patterns around how to use Redux effectively. Anyway, if you can point to some more concrete concerns or have specific suggestions on how we can improve things, I'm very interested - please feel free to comment over in the issues. [0] https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/3321 https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/3321 [1] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2019/10/redux-starter-kit-1.0/ https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2019/10/redux-starter-kit-... [2] https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/3592 https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/3592 [3] https://redux-toolkit.js.org/tutorials/intermediate-tutorial https://redux-toolkit.js.org/tutorials/intermediate-tutorial [4] https://github.com/reduxjs/redux-toolkit/issues/371 https://github.com/reduxjs/redux-toolkit/issues/371
robertlagrant 6y ago
> Where does that leave people? With the choice to use it or not use it. Before that, they only had the choice to not use it.

acemarke 6y ago

Sorry to hear that :( I get what some of what you're saying here, but I also feel a couple of these complaints are misguided. For one thing, the Redux team has never intentionally tried to make Redux "the main state management tool for React". We've never deliberately sold it that way, and goodness knows the React team has said "React is the only official state management tool for React". Redux got popular because it solved the problems people were dealing with when it came out, better than the existing tools in the ecosystem, at a time when React was taking off. We've done our best to clarify in the docs when it does actually make sense to use Redux. Redux Toolkit is still Redux. You're still writing reducers, creating a store, dispatching actions, and updating the UI based on state. RTK just allows you to do so with less code. So, the "Essentials" tutorial starts by introducing those terms, concepts, and data flow, because you need to understand those regardless of how you're writing Redux logic. While Redux _is_ normally used with React, it's also UI-agnostic, hence the separation from React-Redux, and using it with other UI frameworks is a valid use case that we support. We had some long debates about whether to add these additional APIs into the Redux core [0] [1], and concluded that there was too much inertia around the existing Redux ecosystem to build those into the core `redux` package. As it is, even though RTK isn't required, we've had folks say they didn't like some of the opinions we've built into RTK (like using Immer for writing reducers). So, combining all three of those packages into a single super-package is not feasible at this point. I've tossed around the idea of trying to merge the Redux core, React-Redux, and RTK docs into one site, but that would likely require merging all three libs into a monorepo. Not impossible, but not something that's likely to happen any time soon, if only because my own time is very limited and I have a lot of other docs work I need to focus on [2]. Which specific docs page are you referring to? You said "intermediate" and "advanced" - sounds like you're referring to the RTK docs site tutorials [3]? FWIW, I wrote those a year ago, and at the time the main Redux docs were frankly very out of date. I've spent much of this year rewriting the Redux core tutorials, as listed above, and those Redux tutorials are where I would direct anyone who's new to Redux or really wants to know about RTK. We do also have an open issue to discuss what tutorial content should be on the RTK docs site [4], and tbh I'm really not sure _what_ tutorial content should actually be on the RTK site now that the "Essentials" and "Fundamentals" tutorials exist in the core docs. You're right that the actual Redux core itself isn't very complicated, but the biggest issue is trying to teach people to "think in Redux". In fact, it's kind of _because_ the core is so small that there's a lot of documentation needed - so much of this is actually in the patterns around how to use Redux effectively. Anyway, if you can point to some more concrete concerns or have specific suggestions on how we can improve things, I'm very interested - please feel free to comment over in the issues. [0] https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/3321 https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/3321 [1] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2019/10/redux-starter-kit-1.0/ https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2019/10/redux-starter-kit-... [2] https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/3592 https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/issues/3592 [3] https://redux-toolkit.js.org/tutorials/intermediate-tutorial https://redux-toolkit.js.org/tutorials/intermediate-tutorial [4] https://github.com/reduxjs/redux-toolkit/issues/371 https://github.com/reduxjs/redux-toolkit/issues/371

robertlagrant 6y ago

> Where does that leave people? With the choice to use it or not use it. Before that, they only had the choice to not use it.