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I’m old enough to remember pointing out all the ways that React sucked when it was new. It’s unsurprising and profoundly depressing that it’s losing its grip on

I’m old enough to remember pointing out all the ways that React sucked when it was new. It’s unsurprising and profoundly depressing that it’s losing its grip only after so much damage has been done.

hnbad 3y ago
"I disliked the popular thing before it was popular" is not an achievement to take pride in. Heck, most people who picked up React disliked it before using it. The article states that there are better options now so continuing to use React is not the best choice. This was predicted by most advocates of React fairly early on. The mantra was always: React will be replaced by something better; for the time being that something is still React (i.e. present day React looks very different from the early class-based React). At the time React started gaining momentum it was simply the best option for what it did. The biggest alternatives were AngularJS (which was known to be a dead end), Angular 2 (which was stuck in Google's cycle of "let's rewrite everything several times because we're not dogfooding this" -- remember that Angular 2 was initially based on `Object.observe`) or the old rusty toolbelt of jQuery, Backbone, Knockout and whatever else was still polluting globals at the time. React eliminated entire categories of bugs at the time and was the first major frontend framework (well, library) to also support server-side rendering. I think good arguments can be made that e.g. lit-html or htmx is superior to JSX. But at the time those didn't exist and the reason people disliked JSX was that it was different and that it looked like something many had tried before (i.e. VDOMs and XML-ish template DSLs) and that had always ended up sucking. That criticism however came from a place of ignorance (literally "not understanding how it actually works and what it is") and prejudice (i.e. judging by superficial first impressions, not the actual implementation and semantics). If you think React has uniquely done "so much damage", you either think frontend frameworks in general are inherently bad (which is an entirely valid opinion to have tho I wonder why you think seeking out articles about things you hate just to vent about them is a productive use of anyone's time) or you're being extremely disingenuous with regard to what came before React and what can be considered "React's fault".
- lsmeducation 3y ago
  I’ll wait for the “Svelte kind of sucks, and plain old React is fine” article next year before making any decisions (well really I’m waiting for the ‘jquery can do what React and Svelte do believe it or not’ article still). Where are my AI JS blog post generators at? Unless … No can’t be … There’s no way these articles have been AI generated this whole time … right? RIGHT?
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  I love your comment for the quote "old rusty toolbelt of jQuery, Backbone, Knockout and whatever else was still polluting globals at the time"! In all seriousness though, it might be hard to understand how React felt when it was young for those who missed it or have forgotten. Like with any new technology, those writing about it were involved in its development or early libraries based on React, which improved the signal to noise ratio of the ecosystem considerably. It is not only strictly React that was special, either - with the necessity to 'transpile' React's JSX to ordinary JavaScript came the excuse to use a proper build system, rather than just copying JQuery files into each other, which was the predominant distribution method at the time! Of course, eventually, the build systems themselves were overcomplicated and messy, but at that early stage things like SASS and JSX were very exotic and clever.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    > Of course, eventually, the build systems themselves were overcomplicated and messy True. On the other hand people are now rapidly waking up to the fact that the promised simplicity of having real module systems running in the browser (and ideally federated at that) introduces a ton of complexity (not to mention performance problems) compared to simply having a bundler even when you have to deal with code splitting. It's also easy to miss how rapidly React influenced the space. Because React was so narrowly defined (i.e. it didn't bring any state management or styling - I remember it being called "just the V in MVC") a ton of other libraries sprung up around it and it even led to a short rise in popularity of otherwise very niche reactive functional programming DSLs and arguably helped sparking interest in reactive programming in general, such as RxJS (which has since seen and ebb and flow of popularity in Angular).

hnbad 3y ago

"I disliked the popular thing before it was popular" is not an achievement to take pride in. Heck, most people who picked up React disliked it before using it. The article states that there are better options now so continuing to use React is not the best choice. This was predicted by most advocates of React fairly early on. The mantra was always: React will be replaced by something better; for the time being that something is still React (i.e. present day React looks very different from the early class-based React). At the time React started gaining momentum it was simply the best option for what it did. The biggest alternatives were AngularJS (which was known to be a dead end), Angular 2 (which was stuck in Google's cycle of "let's rewrite everything several times because we're not dogfooding this" -- remember that Angular 2 was initially based on `Object.observe`) or the old rusty toolbelt of jQuery, Backbone, Knockout and whatever else was still polluting globals at the time. React eliminated entire categories of bugs at the time and was the first major frontend framework (well, library) to also support server-side rendering. I think good arguments can be made that e.g. lit-html or htmx is superior to JSX. But at the time those didn't exist and the reason people disliked JSX was that it was different and that it looked like something many had tried before (i.e. VDOMs and XML-ish template DSLs) and that had always ended up sucking. That criticism however came from a place of ignorance (literally "not understanding how it actually works and what it is") and prejudice (i.e. judging by superficial first impressions, not the actual implementation and semantics). If you think React has uniquely done "so much damage", you either think frontend frameworks in general are inherently bad (which is an entirely valid opinion to have tho I wonder why you think seeking out articles about things you hate just to vent about them is a productive use of anyone's time) or you're being extremely disingenuous with regard to what came before React and what can be considered "React's fault".

lsmeducation 3y ago
I’ll wait for the “Svelte kind of sucks, and plain old React is fine” article next year before making any decisions (well really I’m waiting for the ‘jquery can do what React and Svelte do believe it or not’ article still). Where are my AI JS blog post generators at? Unless … No can’t be … There’s no way these articles have been AI generated this whole time … right? RIGHT?
seabass-labrax 3y ago
I love your comment for the quote "old rusty toolbelt of jQuery, Backbone, Knockout and whatever else was still polluting globals at the time"! In all seriousness though, it might be hard to understand how React felt when it was young for those who missed it or have forgotten. Like with any new technology, those writing about it were involved in its development or early libraries based on React, which improved the signal to noise ratio of the ecosystem considerably. It is not only strictly React that was special, either - with the necessity to 'transpile' React's JSX to ordinary JavaScript came the excuse to use a proper build system, rather than just copying JQuery files into each other, which was the predominant distribution method at the time! Of course, eventually, the build systems themselves were overcomplicated and messy, but at that early stage things like SASS and JSX were very exotic and clever.
- hnbad 3y ago
  > Of course, eventually, the build systems themselves were overcomplicated and messy True. On the other hand people are now rapidly waking up to the fact that the promised simplicity of having real module systems running in the browser (and ideally federated at that) introduces a ton of complexity (not to mention performance problems) compared to simply having a bundler even when you have to deal with code splitting. It's also easy to miss how rapidly React influenced the space. Because React was so narrowly defined (i.e. it didn't bring any state management or styling - I remember it being called "just the V in MVC") a ton of other libraries sprung up around it and it even led to a short rise in popularity of otherwise very niche reactive functional programming DSLs and arguably helped sparking interest in reactive programming in general, such as RxJS (which has since seen and ebb and flow of popularity in Angular).