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Here's my summary of this article for those who are interested in this: - Author, who is a rails backend developer, got a job where they used rails as a back-e

Here's my summary of this article for those who are interested in this: - Author, who is a rails backend developer, got a job where they used rails as a back-end, and react for front-end - The author has strong backend skills, and strong html skills, but actively avoids javascript, and hates React - Author tried to learn react for a year, but wasn't successful. I think this quote sums it up properly: > ReactJS takes this dirty imperfect, embarrassing JavaScript and makes it more dirty, imperfect and embarrassing. It’s a struggle for anyone who wants to write clean code to come to terms with the messiness of React. This reads a lot more like a pity-party than a critique of any library or framework. I think during interviews, being a lot more honest about shortcomings can really help you understand if you're going to be doing the job you want to do. The author could have been really up front with "I like Rails, I like what it comes with, but I don't like javascript." Especially in today's web tech stacks, I think mentioning where you stand with javascript is pretty important. Most of the web contracts I have want some fancy javascript somewhere.

traverseda 3y ago
I think anyone who is going to listen to a react critique has already heard it. For those looking for a more in-depth critique of react, this article looks good: https://www.zachleat.com/web/react-criticism/ https://www.zachleat.com/web/react-criticism/ Although that focuses more on the objective legal and performance issues, if anyone can recommend something focusing more on architectural and developer ergonomics issues I'd love to see it.
- SebastianKra 3y ago
  The summary does a good job of demonstrating the performance issues. But, just browsing around the web, I noticed that my experiences don't match the criticisms: Amazon is fast, Mastodon is fast, Twitter is (still) fast although a bit flickery, HackerNews loads slower than TheVerge for some reason. JetBrains Space is fast, Jira is a disaster. Static sites like GitHub and GitLab have been testing my patience recently - I wish GitLab was an SPA. The React pages that feel slow are often just poorly designed (momondo.com) or load ten times as much data than React could be responsible for (booking.com, icloud.com). Admittedly, I'm not in a lab. I have content blockers, a fast computer and decent internet. But personally, I don't see a significant correlation between the framework and the perceived speed. Other aspects, such as the design of loading states seem more important.

traverseda 3y ago

I think anyone who is going to listen to a react critique has already heard it. For those looking for a more in-depth critique of react, this article looks good: https://www.zachleat.com/web/react-criticism/ https://www.zachleat.com/web/react-criticism/ Although that focuses more on the objective legal and performance issues, if anyone can recommend something focusing more on architectural and developer ergonomics issues I'd love to see it.

SebastianKra 3y ago
The summary does a good job of demonstrating the performance issues. But, just browsing around the web, I noticed that my experiences don't match the criticisms: Amazon is fast, Mastodon is fast, Twitter is (still) fast although a bit flickery, HackerNews loads slower than TheVerge for some reason. JetBrains Space is fast, Jira is a disaster. Static sites like GitHub and GitLab have been testing my patience recently - I wish GitLab was an SPA. The React pages that feel slow are often just poorly designed (momondo.com) or load ten times as much data than React could be responsible for (booking.com, icloud.com). Admittedly, I'm not in a lab. I have content blockers, a fast computer and decent internet. But personally, I don't see a significant correlation between the framework and the perceived speed. Other aspects, such as the design of loading states seem more important.