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Why is react so popular? It’s just covering a small part of the stack and doesn’t bring much to the table? There were so many other solutions before and so many

Why is react so popular? It’s just covering a small part of the stack and doesn’t bring much to the table? There were so many other solutions before and so many other solutions now. Are people attracted by the name Zuckerberg? Srsly I don’t get the react hype. Didn’t get it 7 years ago. Don’t get it now…

dimitrios1 4y ago
Zuckerberg had nothing to do with the development of React other than being the CEO of the company that developed it. Jordan Walke created React. React was revolutionary in the day of Dojo and Angular 1 complexity and jQuery spaghetti. It was a small library that let you build declarative UIs. It was simpler and easier to use than most anything at the time. It also brought along with it the virtual dom, which at the time was the fastest way to render an app of any sort of complexity. At the time IE6 was the dominate browser, enterprise or otherwise, and Chrome and Firefox were still the new kids on the block. IE6 did not have JIT compilation and still ran Javascript in purely interpretive mode, so simply by using React made your app 2x as fast. The complexity, the feature sets, and the move more towards FP-land came later. There is still a pretty straightfoward path to using React rather simply as your UI library. If you don't get why it became so popular, it just means you haven't had to use much JavaScript to develop apps for at least a decade.
- hit8run 4y ago
  It is interesting that you automatically assume that I didn't have many touchpoints with JS just because I don't get the hype. Actually quite the opposite is the case. I was happily writing loads of vanillajs, tons of Angular(1) and wrote several years codebases in emberjs. Besides that I worked with Vue and yes also React once. React brought nothing to the table that was helping me ship faster and make less unimportant decisions. Back when I had to touch react every week there was a new flavour how to handle routing, state, validate forms and sync to the backend. Ember and Angular had a good default there and were not harder to use. (Nowadays I tend to stay away from fat js frameworks but mainly because I went indie dev and need to be resource efficient building full stack apps with Rails. But that is a different story. And yes I worked with Go, Python, Java and C# in the backend too.)
  - dimitrios1 4y ago
    Well I only made that assumption because you seem to have assumed people use React because of Mark Zuckerburg, apologies there. In either case, kudos to you for actually enjoying the early days of using Ember 1 and Angular 1. I only look back on those days in horror.
- graphclimb 4y ago
  It also introduced syntax that did modular components and made more sense compared to Angular 1.

dimitrios1 4y ago

Zuckerberg had nothing to do with the development of React other than being the CEO of the company that developed it. Jordan Walke created React. React was revolutionary in the day of Dojo and Angular 1 complexity and jQuery spaghetti. It was a small library that let you build declarative UIs. It was simpler and easier to use than most anything at the time. It also brought along with it the virtual dom, which at the time was the fastest way to render an app of any sort of complexity. At the time IE6 was the dominate browser, enterprise or otherwise, and Chrome and Firefox were still the new kids on the block. IE6 did not have JIT compilation and still ran Javascript in purely interpretive mode, so simply by using React made your app 2x as fast. The complexity, the feature sets, and the move more towards FP-land came later. There is still a pretty straightfoward path to using React rather simply as your UI library. If you don't get why it became so popular, it just means you haven't had to use much JavaScript to develop apps for at least a decade.

hit8run 4y ago
It is interesting that you automatically assume that I didn't have many touchpoints with JS just because I don't get the hype. Actually quite the opposite is the case. I was happily writing loads of vanillajs, tons of Angular(1) and wrote several years codebases in emberjs. Besides that I worked with Vue and yes also React once. React brought nothing to the table that was helping me ship faster and make less unimportant decisions. Back when I had to touch react every week there was a new flavour how to handle routing, state, validate forms and sync to the backend. Ember and Angular had a good default there and were not harder to use. (Nowadays I tend to stay away from fat js frameworks but mainly because I went indie dev and need to be resource efficient building full stack apps with Rails. But that is a different story. And yes I worked with Go, Python, Java and C# in the backend too.)
- dimitrios1 4y ago
  Well I only made that assumption because you seem to have assumed people use React because of Mark Zuckerburg, apologies there. In either case, kudos to you for actually enjoying the early days of using Ember 1 and Angular 1. I only look back on those days in horror.
graphclimb 4y ago
It also introduced syntax that did modular components and made more sense compared to Angular 1.