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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 seriousne

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

> 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).