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I do feel as though a lot of the initial conditions that existed around the time of React’s release are mostly no longer relevant and many of the assumptions th

by mhoad 4y ago

I do feel as though a lot of the initial conditions that existed around the time of React’s release are mostly no longer relevant and many of the assumptions that it was built around are no longer true. It never cared much about the gaps that started to develop between “the React way” and the underlying web platform and now it’s off in its own weird self contained ecosystem and doesn’t play particularly well with anything else. It also is one of those frameworks that starts forcing you to extend the same broken abstractions further and further into the rest of your stack up into your backends and data models. That isn’t a healthy sign at all.

glenngillen 4y ago
I get a vague sense that this comment resonates with me, but I don’t know exactly why (I only occasionally do front end stuff too so it’s not exactly my area of expertise). Could you elaborate on what assumptions are no longer true?
- mhoad 4y ago
  The entire need and premise for virtual DOM stands out as a pretty big example for me here. Made a lot of sense at the time but is an actively bad choice in 2023. Similar argument on things like their synthetic events approach where you now have to pay a runtime cost now to just implement something in a worse fashion and much slower language that the browser already provides for you.
  - jitl 4y ago
    At least SyntheticEvent objects with their re-use pool and bounded lifetime are long gone and all the events are once again Native browser Event objects with no lifetime issues. Dealing with that event pooling shenanigans was annoying.
scrollaway 4y ago
> I do feel as though a lot of the initial conditions that existed around the time of React’s release are mostly no longer relevant Because react fixed those by showing the web frontend world that reactive UIs are easier to reason about, and showed how to implement those in a natural way. I remember writing a WoW talent calculator in jquery. Took me a month. I could write the same thing in react today in a few hours.
- mhoad 4y ago
  I’m not saying it wasn’t helpful, we did learn a lot about UI development for the web but we learned a lot of new things that don’t work well too and a bunch of those things are very React specific these days. Furthermore compared to more modern takes on the problem and the evolution of the platform itself it’s probably not what you should be stating projects with these days without a good reason (I.e it’s no longer an obvious default choice)
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    Starting a project with NextJS today is an absolutely fine choice. It’s a great and living ecosystem, supported by loads of commercial players and with a huge talent pool to draw from.

by mhoad 4y ago

glenngillen 4y ago

I get a vague sense that this comment resonates with me, but I don’t know exactly why (I only occasionally do front end stuff too so it’s not exactly my area of expertise). Could you elaborate on what assumptions are no longer true?

mhoad 4y ago
The entire need and premise for virtual DOM stands out as a pretty big example for me here. Made a lot of sense at the time but is an actively bad choice in 2023. Similar argument on things like their synthetic events approach where you now have to pay a runtime cost now to just implement something in a worse fashion and much slower language that the browser already provides for you.
- jitl 4y ago
  At least SyntheticEvent objects with their re-use pool and bounded lifetime are long gone and all the events are once again Native browser Event objects with no lifetime issues. Dealing with that event pooling shenanigans was annoying.

scrollaway 4y ago

> I do feel as though a lot of the initial conditions that existed around the time of React’s release are mostly no longer relevant Because react fixed those by showing the web frontend world that reactive UIs are easier to reason about, and showed how to implement those in a natural way. I remember writing a WoW talent calculator in jquery. Took me a month. I could write the same thing in react today in a few hours.

mhoad 4y ago
I’m not saying it wasn’t helpful, we did learn a lot about UI development for the web but we learned a lot of new things that don’t work well too and a bunch of those things are very React specific these days. Furthermore compared to more modern takes on the problem and the evolution of the platform itself it’s probably not what you should be stating projects with these days without a good reason (I.e it’s no longer an obvious default choice)
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Starting a project with NextJS today is an absolutely fine choice. It’s a great and living ecosystem, supported by loads of commercial players and with a huge talent pool to draw from.