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I finally learned some React a couple of months ago on the premise that as a designer, I needed a better understanding of the frameworks used by the developers

I finally learned some React a couple of months ago on the premise that as a designer, I needed a better understanding of the frameworks used by the developers I work with. I know React enforces some better practices that my spaghetti-jQuery of yore never followed, and that I was getting a crash course in those practices at the same time, but I was nonetheless surprised at just how slow I felt working in it! It gave me a new appreciation of just how accessible jQuery is, and how intuitive its concepts are to someone without a background in software development, perhaps for better or worse. Obviously this is a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, given the intended uses of the two frameworks, but for simple projects, it's hard to imagine a better balance of accessibility and flexibility than jQuery.

bdcravens 5y ago
Sounds like you're working on jQuery-sized apps, not React-sized. The problem is that many don't know the difference, and everything is React-sized, even apps that have no business being anything but server-rendered.
- lordgroff 5y ago
  Yep... I mean, part of that is a problem of "SPA everything" cargo cult; basic web page? SPA everything! Content management? SPA everything! I manage my wife's electronic store that's based on WordPress, and I see absolutely no reason for ever changing it. I've written a bunch of custom scripts, all in PHP back-end and jquery front-end, and... It just works. And it's fast. And complexity is totally manageable. But, I've also written a few SPAs for her business deployed as PWAs, and I can't even begin to think about how it would look like if I was using jquery for these tasks. React (or Vue or whatever) is an escape hatch from going insane in such situations.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    The software I manage is a very complex asynchronous workflow engine sometimes spanning across hundreds of containers. It's our bread and butter. Our marketing site is in Wordpress.
j-krieger 5y ago
Note that you may have this opinion because you started with jQuery first, and you're already familiar with it. Some things are not at all intuitive for beginners in jQuery, either.

bdcravens 5y ago

Sounds like you're working on jQuery-sized apps, not React-sized. The problem is that many don't know the difference, and everything is React-sized, even apps that have no business being anything but server-rendered.

lordgroff 5y ago
Yep... I mean, part of that is a problem of "SPA everything" cargo cult; basic web page? SPA everything! Content management? SPA everything! I manage my wife's electronic store that's based on WordPress, and I see absolutely no reason for ever changing it. I've written a bunch of custom scripts, all in PHP back-end and jquery front-end, and... It just works. And it's fast. And complexity is totally manageable. But, I've also written a few SPAs for her business deployed as PWAs, and I can't even begin to think about how it would look like if I was using jquery for these tasks. React (or Vue or whatever) is an escape hatch from going insane in such situations.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  The software I manage is a very complex asynchronous workflow engine sometimes spanning across hundreds of containers. It's our bread and butter. Our marketing site is in Wordpress.

j-krieger 5y ago

Note that you may have this opinion because you started with jQuery first, and you're already familiar with it. Some things are not at all intuitive for beginners in jQuery, either.