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React definitely continues to innovate. Functional components and hooks were a huge innovation to class components and significantly improved the ergonomics of

React definitely continues to innovate. Functional components and hooks were a huge innovation to class components and significantly improved the ergonomics of the library. That was only a few years ago. The team is actively working on RSC (react server components) which will have a similarly large impact on react's capabilities. Frameworks like remix and next will be able to leverage and build on this to create even better systems for building apps. The whole signals blow up event is weird to me. Seems to be a loud and extremely small minority making a fuss around it. IMO React continues to dominate over others (Vue, Svelte, Angular, Solid etc) because its just better - it embraces JS (no v-for, ng-for, non JS language) and strictly sticks to the idea that the view is a function of state.

rk06 4y ago
All blow up events come from a loud and extremely small minority. But whether they are making noise or signal, does not depend on number of people! React continues to dominate others because it meets baseline criteria for a js framework. And has corporate backing while Vue doesn't. Angular 1 was also popular because it was average js framework with google's backing before angular 2. Implying that React remains popular for purely it's technical merit is utter nonsense. Because if react was really technically better, then no one would have migrated to Vue, solid and svelte or angular for that matter
- bern4444 4y ago
  > All blow up events come from a loud and extremely small minority. But whether they are making noise or signal, does not depend on number of people! Fair, this instance is 100% noise imo. We're engineers - we should be able to judge when something is silly. > React continues to dominate others because it has corporate backing while Vue doesn't. And angular was popular for the same reason before angular 2. I have never heard anyone in the last few years say react is better because it's backed by FB. I pick it because it embraces JS (unlike Svelte), doesn't reinvent the wheel (ng-for, v-for), and has a track record of maintaining backwards compatibility (unlike Angular re Angular vs Angular 2, hey its google what else should you expect). Class components continue to work 100%. Angular is backed by google - a much bigger company than FB and its nowhere close to as successful. > Implying that React remains popular for purely it's technical merit is pure nonsense. Because if react was really technically better, then no one would have migrates to Vue, solid and svelte or angular for that matter Some companies like to experiment, or have very unique challenges for which they find other tools better. I avoid Angular and Svelte - both have made such odd decisions. Some people do just prefer one tool over another! There will never be any set of capable tools where 100% of people select the same one. That's the variation of life. Per the article's comment on forms and react and the messiness that ensues, well we're engineers. We can't expect a single library to solve every problem. We should be responsible for avoiding bad patterns like throwing from state into react state. It's 100% not necessary and should be kept separate.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    You picked it because others before you had already decided and that was based off of the facebook name and backing. No one expected facebook to take such a pr hit over the last few years but ignoring why it become market leader misses the angular breakage event where everyone flocked from Google's framework to facebook's framework. The reasons for not using other frameworks seems copycat without logic. For example vue uses v-for I don't want to have to learn a handful of obvious tags like v-if or v-else but then choosing react which has adopted jsx something that requires converting standard html and learning more to get you to the same place.
    - bern4444 4y ago
      FB's reputation has no bearing on my choosing react vs svelte vs x or y or z. I continue to pick React for projects because it's better than the alternatives - not because others before me have picked it and I'm just copycatting. I can understand why some dislike JSX. I happen to think it's a great abstraction that elegantly combines the declarative nature of HTML and the power of JS. It's always worth noting JSX can and is used in libraries beyond React (hello Vue!) which further demonstrates its composable nature and flexibility.
  - mattigames 4y ago
    "Doesn't reinvent the wheel" they literally created a whole new language called JSX, I have 13 years writing JS and I dislike React and JSX is one of the reasons. As far I can tell reason it's picked a lot of times now it's market share, people see that is more popular than the competition so they try to learn it, creating a feedback loop that just makes it more popular.
    - bern4444 4y ago
      JSX has been around for 7 or so years... that's a good amount of time. Over half of your 13 years :) Do you avoid JSX when using Vue or other libraries that support JSX? Are you invoking the library function directly - React.createElement or vue's equivalent instead?
- zarzavat 4y ago
  Vue is more akin to the old way of doing things with static templates (Jinja, Mustache, Erb, PHP), just with a dynamic twist. React is not perfect, it's bloated, but the reason it took off is that it brought something new to the table as a general and programmatic way to construct UIs. Being a child of Facebook helped it achieve dominance but considering that before React we had angular (shudder) and jquery, React's success was well earned. React will be replaced when something actually better comes along. The current contenders seem to want to return us to the technology of the past, it didn't work then and it doesn't work now.
  - norman784 4y ago
    Everyone is going back to "past technologies" like SSR, being old tech does not mean obsolete, send html directly to the browser in most cases is better than render them in the client, I think the better approach in theory is the island architecture that I saw on Fresh/deno and Qwik, both feels more like how we used to work in the past, minimal JS send to the client and more HTML send from the server.
    - brnewd 4y ago
      SSR never faded and has always been an important requirement. Especially if you wrote SEO sensitive SPA's. We are not going back to SSR but are able to combine both SSR and SPA's more easily, as is indeed the case with dynamic islands and for instance React Server Components.
  - CharlieDigital 4y ago
    Not sure if you've worked with Vue 3's "composition API", but it is very different from Vue 2's "options API". The composition API is bliss. What's more important with Vue and fine-grained reactivity is that it is very forgiving of mistakes and poor practices that in React would cause much more significant side effects and performance issues.
    - FactualActuals 4y ago
      Vue in general has been a godsend to me at least. When I was in college, we used AngularJS for web development courses at the time. My first job had me working with Qt and Tkinter. When I finally had the chance to do web development again, my team chose Vue and it was so easy to pick up from my AngularJS background. My current team is using Vue 3 with the Composition API and it is way more forgiving with mistakes than the Options API. I've helped transition 3 developers so far to Vue 3 and they all love what Vue has to offer when compared to React.
tobr 4y ago
Functional components were introduced in 2015. It’s a little worrying if that’s your first example of how React definitely continues to innovate.
anileated 4y ago
React isn’t moving fast. React server components were announced two years ago and are still not available. That said, as a low-level library it should not move fast; it should make sound design decisions while maintaining compatibility. It’s completely open to frameworks with more opinions and friendlier DX to be built on top of it.
Klonoar 4y ago
>Functional components and hooks were a huge innovation to class components and significantly improved the ergonomics of the library. I see this said a lot with particular regard to hooks, and to this day I just can't buy in. For whatever problems class components have, they enforce a general layout of the component in a way that hooks don't. Reading some codebases that are all in on hooks feels like the wild west and is frankly nightmare-ish to untangle.
timeon 4y ago
> (Vue, Svelte, Angular, Solid etc) > it embraces JS (no v-for, ng-for, non JS language) and strictly sticks to the idea that the view is a function of state. So does Solid No?

rk06 4y ago

All blow up events come from a loud and extremely small minority. But whether they are making noise or signal, does not depend on number of people! React continues to dominate others because it meets baseline criteria for a js framework. And has corporate backing while Vue doesn't. Angular 1 was also popular because it was average js framework with google's backing before angular 2. Implying that React remains popular for purely it's technical merit is utter nonsense. Because if react was really technically better, then no one would have migrated to Vue, solid and svelte or angular for that matter

bern4444 4y ago
> All blow up events come from a loud and extremely small minority. But whether they are making noise or signal, does not depend on number of people! Fair, this instance is 100% noise imo. We're engineers - we should be able to judge when something is silly. > React continues to dominate others because it has corporate backing while Vue doesn't. And angular was popular for the same reason before angular 2. I have never heard anyone in the last few years say react is better because it's backed by FB. I pick it because it embraces JS (unlike Svelte), doesn't reinvent the wheel (ng-for, v-for), and has a track record of maintaining backwards compatibility (unlike Angular re Angular vs Angular 2, hey its google what else should you expect). Class components continue to work 100%. Angular is backed by google - a much bigger company than FB and its nowhere close to as successful. > Implying that React remains popular for purely it's technical merit is pure nonsense. Because if react was really technically better, then no one would have migrates to Vue, solid and svelte or angular for that matter Some companies like to experiment, or have very unique challenges for which they find other tools better. I avoid Angular and Svelte - both have made such odd decisions. Some people do just prefer one tool over another! There will never be any set of capable tools where 100% of people select the same one. That's the variation of life. Per the article's comment on forms and react and the messiness that ensues, well we're engineers. We can't expect a single library to solve every problem. We should be responsible for avoiding bad patterns like throwing from state into react state. It's 100% not necessary and should be kept separate.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  You picked it because others before you had already decided and that was based off of the facebook name and backing. No one expected facebook to take such a pr hit over the last few years but ignoring why it become market leader misses the angular breakage event where everyone flocked from Google's framework to facebook's framework. The reasons for not using other frameworks seems copycat without logic. For example vue uses v-for I don't want to have to learn a handful of obvious tags like v-if or v-else but then choosing react which has adopted jsx something that requires converting standard html and learning more to get you to the same place.
  - bern4444 4y ago
    FB's reputation has no bearing on my choosing react vs svelte vs x or y or z. I continue to pick React for projects because it's better than the alternatives - not because others before me have picked it and I'm just copycatting. I can understand why some dislike JSX. I happen to think it's a great abstraction that elegantly combines the declarative nature of HTML and the power of JS. It's always worth noting JSX can and is used in libraries beyond React (hello Vue!) which further demonstrates its composable nature and flexibility.
- mattigames 4y ago
  "Doesn't reinvent the wheel" they literally created a whole new language called JSX, I have 13 years writing JS and I dislike React and JSX is one of the reasons. As far I can tell reason it's picked a lot of times now it's market share, people see that is more popular than the competition so they try to learn it, creating a feedback loop that just makes it more popular.
  - bern4444 4y ago
    JSX has been around for 7 or so years... that's a good amount of time. Over half of your 13 years :) Do you avoid JSX when using Vue or other libraries that support JSX? Are you invoking the library function directly - React.createElement or vue's equivalent instead?
zarzavat 4y ago
Vue is more akin to the old way of doing things with static templates (Jinja, Mustache, Erb, PHP), just with a dynamic twist. React is not perfect, it's bloated, but the reason it took off is that it brought something new to the table as a general and programmatic way to construct UIs. Being a child of Facebook helped it achieve dominance but considering that before React we had angular (shudder) and jquery, React's success was well earned. React will be replaced when something actually better comes along. The current contenders seem to want to return us to the technology of the past, it didn't work then and it doesn't work now.
- norman784 4y ago
  Everyone is going back to "past technologies" like SSR, being old tech does not mean obsolete, send html directly to the browser in most cases is better than render them in the client, I think the better approach in theory is the island architecture that I saw on Fresh/deno and Qwik, both feels more like how we used to work in the past, minimal JS send to the client and more HTML send from the server.
  - brnewd 4y ago
    SSR never faded and has always been an important requirement. Especially if you wrote SEO sensitive SPA's. We are not going back to SSR but are able to combine both SSR and SPA's more easily, as is indeed the case with dynamic islands and for instance React Server Components.
- CharlieDigital 4y ago
  Not sure if you've worked with Vue 3's "composition API", but it is very different from Vue 2's "options API". The composition API is bliss. What's more important with Vue and fine-grained reactivity is that it is very forgiving of mistakes and poor practices that in React would cause much more significant side effects and performance issues.
  - FactualActuals 4y ago
    Vue in general has been a godsend to me at least. When I was in college, we used AngularJS for web development courses at the time. My first job had me working with Qt and Tkinter. When I finally had the chance to do web development again, my team chose Vue and it was so easy to pick up from my AngularJS background. My current team is using Vue 3 with the Composition API and it is way more forgiving with mistakes than the Options API. I've helped transition 3 developers so far to Vue 3 and they all love what Vue has to offer when compared to React.

tobr 4y ago

Functional components were introduced in 2015. It’s a little worrying if that’s your first example of how React definitely continues to innovate.

anileated 4y ago

React isn’t moving fast. React server components were announced two years ago and are still not available. That said, as a low-level library it should not move fast; it should make sound design decisions while maintaining compatibility. It’s completely open to frameworks with more opinions and friendlier DX to be built on top of it.

Klonoar 4y ago

>Functional components and hooks were a huge innovation to class components and significantly improved the ergonomics of the library. I see this said a lot with particular regard to hooks, and to this day I just can't buy in. For whatever problems class components have, they enforce a general layout of the component in a way that hooks don't. Reading some codebases that are all in on hooks feels like the wild west and is frankly nightmare-ish to untangle.

timeon 4y ago

> (Vue, Svelte, Angular, Solid etc) > it embraces JS (no v-for, ng-for, non JS language) and strictly sticks to the idea that the view is a function of state. So does Solid No?