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After using Vue for a long time, React felt like an unforgiving piece of cr*p. As time went on and Vue was getting its Composition API while kind of moving in t

After using Vue for a long time, React felt like an unforgiving piece of cr*p. As time went on and Vue was getting its Composition API while kind of moving in the overall direction of React, I decided to try class-based components and didn’t like them that much (this was a couple of years ago). Recently, I went through these new docs and read and applied the stuff I learned, and I can say it was a surprisingly nice experience. I just needed to get friendly with a composition-ish, functional-ish and JSX-ish way of thinking. Alone the thought of HTML-in-JS instead of JS-in-HTML made me crazy back then (it still kinda does). But when you get the hang of building actual user interfaces instead of just websites, it makes a lot of sense. If you’re comfortable with javascript while daring to take the less-opinionated route as opposed to an all-out framework, you'll simply feel the power! Anyhow… To this day, I still think it’s an unforgiving, crazy beast of a library for a weekend hobbyist developer like me. But I kinda like it now and in big part it’s thanks to hooks, functional components and these new docs. Good job team, and congratulations on finally getting this live!

danabramov 4y ago
Thank you! Glad to hear it made things click :)
eoic 4y ago
Interesting, I had an opposite experience. I started out using React when using class based components was a way to go then stopped for quite some time. Years ago I had to use React for something and decided to use the new approach with hooks and it was such a painful experience - it was harder to learn and use, also I introduced many ridiculous rendering bugs. I still feel that component based approach was somewhat easier and more straightforward to get into even if more verbose.
- iamsanteri 4y ago
  Yes, it can be tricky, and sometimes I too catch myself asking, "why is it designed like it is" with regards to hooks, I won't lie. But, there is something there that makes it attractive to me where it was off-putting before. Alone as a complement to more extensive state management libraries, or other tools intended for larger scale apps, it serves as a nice middle-ground solution. You can build your own bits of logic in quite an accessible way now too. In other words, for me personally I feel that there is something distinct and interesting going on here. Finally, if you combine it with the fact that it seems to hold on as the industry standard for jobs, and being useful for native mobile development via React Native, it all comes together nicely in my mind. With its huge ecosystem and closeness to plain vanilla JS, I guess it just makes me simply a bit of a better developer and gives me a new perspective on things. That's that.
epolanski 4y ago
As someone who worked with both, vue 3 is miles ahead imho. Scoped css, well working two-ways data binding (now being mimicked again with signals after mobx demise) and reactivity, easier to get performance out of the box without the hook madness.
- iamsanteri 4y ago
  In many ways I do agree with you, but by now all these front-end frameworks and libraries, including their server-side rendered counterparts (like Nuxt, Next, etc.) just keep borrowing things from each other. Regarding performance, I remember having blocking sluggishness with v-model that shouldn’t have been there back in Vue 2 days. Also, for example, in Vue 3, my favorite component library Buefy (based on Bulma) is no longer available, and I don't think any of the other ones have (arguably) come so close and extensive to what I want. Vue 2's transition to Vue 3 (if you want to use the new CLI tools and the Composition API) had to, by definition, fragment the ecosystem in unpleasant ways no matter how carefully and sensibly it was managed by the core teams in charge. You can see that Vue went down slightly in recent developer surveys, and I suspect this to be among the main reasons. As if Evan himself would be suddenly more focused on his build tool Vite as opposed to Vue itself (of course it's just an illusion). But I still love Vue because of their amazing docs, and the fact that they let me enter the world of web-development in a relatively accessible manner (this may not have been possible with React, for me personally). Lack of something like scoped styles alone baffles me in React to this day, but it makes kinda sense in the ecosystem it's operating in...
  - epolanski 4y ago
    Oh, nice for reminding me, SSR is also better imho on Vue with Nuxt than anything in react world. Next.js has the tendency of monkey patching plenty of APIs, even broke native fetch when uploading anything bigger than 14 kbs.
    - Rauchg 4y ago
      To clarify: there's no "native" fetch to patch. Both Nuxt and Next have been adding it to the runtime to normalize it across Node.js versions and environments, and to add critical capabilities that the Web standard lacked (like being able to read the `set-cookie` header or customize `Host`). Worth noting: we've been enabling SSR for React since 2016[1], and some of the largest websites on the internet SSR with Next.js: Twitch, Hulu, Nike, and even parts of Amazon[2] [1] https://vercel.com/blog/next https://vercel.com/blog/next [2] https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1594779272945627136 https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1594779272945627136
bpicolo 4y ago
I also like what it inspired in Vue. At first I thought "oh no they're taking what React did and throwing it into Vue". But it actually ended up to be a very true-to-Vue variant with just some idiom similarities. The new Vue 3 ecosystem with Pinia blends together nicely
solumunus 4y ago
Svelte > Vue > React
- iamsanteri 4y ago
  Is it possible to add Svelte gradually for simple and small parts of a website without a compile step? It surely seems amazing and all the rave these days! Then again, the whole front-end ecosystem is moving at a pace I cannot quite follow. Instead, I've been going into the direction of traditional monoliths and working through the docs of Django and RoR. There you have a plain "good-old" templating language with sprinkles of htmx and alpine where you need it. This along a bunch of back-end devs that seem to not want to even touch the javascript stuff with a stick. It almost feels refreshing though, particularly if you want to build rapid MVPs while retaining maximum control of your entire stack and IP. When teams grow and you need to support extensive and/or thicker clients, I believe this is where bigger front-end libraries like you mention truly shine. I'm still counting on us coming a full circle and there being a re-emergence of traditional monoliths in the future though. But then again, with supabases, pocketbases, strapis and other "simpler" backends of this world, who knows what'll be happening even in the nearest future...

danabramov 4y ago

Thank you! Glad to hear it made things click :)

eoic 4y ago

Interesting, I had an opposite experience. I started out using React when using class based components was a way to go then stopped for quite some time. Years ago I had to use React for something and decided to use the new approach with hooks and it was such a painful experience - it was harder to learn and use, also I introduced many ridiculous rendering bugs. I still feel that component based approach was somewhat easier and more straightforward to get into even if more verbose.

iamsanteri 4y ago
Yes, it can be tricky, and sometimes I too catch myself asking, "why is it designed like it is" with regards to hooks, I won't lie. But, there is something there that makes it attractive to me where it was off-putting before. Alone as a complement to more extensive state management libraries, or other tools intended for larger scale apps, it serves as a nice middle-ground solution. You can build your own bits of logic in quite an accessible way now too. In other words, for me personally I feel that there is something distinct and interesting going on here. Finally, if you combine it with the fact that it seems to hold on as the industry standard for jobs, and being useful for native mobile development via React Native, it all comes together nicely in my mind. With its huge ecosystem and closeness to plain vanilla JS, I guess it just makes me simply a bit of a better developer and gives me a new perspective on things. That's that.

epolanski 4y ago

As someone who worked with both, vue 3 is miles ahead imho. Scoped css, well working two-ways data binding (now being mimicked again with signals after mobx demise) and reactivity, easier to get performance out of the box without the hook madness.

iamsanteri 4y ago
In many ways I do agree with you, but by now all these front-end frameworks and libraries, including their server-side rendered counterparts (like Nuxt, Next, etc.) just keep borrowing things from each other. Regarding performance, I remember having blocking sluggishness with v-model that shouldn’t have been there back in Vue 2 days. Also, for example, in Vue 3, my favorite component library Buefy (based on Bulma) is no longer available, and I don't think any of the other ones have (arguably) come so close and extensive to what I want. Vue 2's transition to Vue 3 (if you want to use the new CLI tools and the Composition API) had to, by definition, fragment the ecosystem in unpleasant ways no matter how carefully and sensibly it was managed by the core teams in charge. You can see that Vue went down slightly in recent developer surveys, and I suspect this to be among the main reasons. As if Evan himself would be suddenly more focused on his build tool Vite as opposed to Vue itself (of course it's just an illusion). But I still love Vue because of their amazing docs, and the fact that they let me enter the world of web-development in a relatively accessible manner (this may not have been possible with React, for me personally). Lack of something like scoped styles alone baffles me in React to this day, but it makes kinda sense in the ecosystem it's operating in...
- epolanski 4y ago
  Oh, nice for reminding me, SSR is also better imho on Vue with Nuxt than anything in react world. Next.js has the tendency of monkey patching plenty of APIs, even broke native fetch when uploading anything bigger than 14 kbs.
  - Rauchg 4y ago
    To clarify: there's no "native" fetch to patch. Both Nuxt and Next have been adding it to the runtime to normalize it across Node.js versions and environments, and to add critical capabilities that the Web standard lacked (like being able to read the `set-cookie` header or customize `Host`). Worth noting: we've been enabling SSR for React since 2016[1], and some of the largest websites on the internet SSR with Next.js: Twitch, Hulu, Nike, and even parts of Amazon[2] [1] https://vercel.com/blog/next https://vercel.com/blog/next [2] https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1594779272945627136 https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1594779272945627136

bpicolo 4y ago

I also like what it inspired in Vue. At first I thought "oh no they're taking what React did and throwing it into Vue". But it actually ended up to be a very true-to-Vue variant with just some idiom similarities. The new Vue 3 ecosystem with Pinia blends together nicely

solumunus 4y ago

Svelte > Vue > React

iamsanteri 4y ago
Is it possible to add Svelte gradually for simple and small parts of a website without a compile step? It surely seems amazing and all the rave these days! Then again, the whole front-end ecosystem is moving at a pace I cannot quite follow. Instead, I've been going into the direction of traditional monoliths and working through the docs of Django and RoR. There you have a plain "good-old" templating language with sprinkles of htmx and alpine where you need it. This along a bunch of back-end devs that seem to not want to even touch the javascript stuff with a stick. It almost feels refreshing though, particularly if you want to build rapid MVPs while retaining maximum control of your entire stack and IP. When teams grow and you need to support extensive and/or thicker clients, I believe this is where bigger front-end libraries like you mention truly shine. I'm still counting on us coming a full circle and there being a re-emergence of traditional monoliths in the future though. But then again, with supabases, pocketbases, strapis and other "simpler" backends of this world, who knows what'll be happening even in the nearest future...