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React isn’t the problem. Bad architecture is the problem, eg, making everything a reducer, no separation of concerns, etc. But yes, the generalized and popular

React isn’t the problem. Bad architecture is the problem, eg, making everything a reducer, no separation of concerns, etc. But yes, the generalized and popular React ecosystem is a mess.

andrekandre 3y ago
> making everything a reducer just curiosity from someone whos not very experienced in react, but what are the problems with that?
- selfmodruntime 3y ago
  Instead of living the basic react way and gathering state in one component and passing it down as a prop to a child, you feed it into a global "state store". The child component then requests the exact state they need from the state store. This also works reversed, instead of passing "setX" as a function to a child, you just rely on them to gather the state and pass it to the store. The thought behind this is that components live in pyramids, and state and props ideally only go down and rarely up by setters-> parents and their immediate children can easily share state and props. This gets more complicated the larger your family line gets. Many grandchildren down, you have since passed the respective props via prop drilling through a lot of components that perhaps don't care for them. It also gets complicated if you want to share state not in an immediate family line, but in a neighborhood. Overdoing it is almost like hoarding. You think "eh, maybe I need this later somewhere else) and suddenly, your entire application basically lives in the global store.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    Redux, and later useContext, were invented specifically to eliminate prop drilling.
    - williamcotton 3y ago
      Prop drilling wouldn’t be an issue in a functional language as partial application could solve this problem. I think a lot of the issues with React in general has to do with attempting to contort JS into a functional language. useContext can lead to some gnarly code.
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        The major issue, IMO, is that the DOM is just markup with an API grafted on, and so any framework attempting to add the slightest bit of composability or state management has to twist and turn itself to be compatible in all browsers. And that's how we got here, because everyone wants to make their applications available on as many platforms as possible, without having to maintain five or six separate teams that have to coordinate a roadmap, and the browser is the only somewhat consistent way to do this.
      - simonbarker87 3y ago
        > contort JS into a functional language I made something last year in a functional style as I was fresh off the back of a few React jobs and projects. I got a proof of concept working but the code was awful to work with. I took a couple of days to start over and rewrite it with OOP principles and it was in a much better state afterwards.
      - selfmodruntime 3y ago
        This is untrue. You can observe this in scalas implicits, which generate an insane mess in any medium to large codebase.
    - wmfiv 3y ago
      Right. And I think the point is that Redux is a godsend for some small percentage of products but for the vast majority the cure is worse than the disease. Simple and slightly verbose is just "better" as a general solution than the powerful but complex solutions you get with Redux.
    - airtonix 3y ago
      [dead]
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    A global store isn’t necessarily a bad thing… in a functional language!
- williamcotton 3y ago
  It is unnecessarily complex for many problems. You can blast away state in many instances. Sure, use it for multithreaded real-time chat, but don’t use it for simple CRUD.
b33j0r 3y ago
Components are a good idea, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater! Just don’t make me develop a production site with a dev environment that falls over due to CORS for my first semester at my fancy new job ;) (And why do you call state management in stateless design “hooks?” And, and!) Web components are great, let’s build a framework around them! /sarcasm probably referencing an XKCD
simonbarker87 3y ago
Agree that React isn’t the problem, I worked on an equally large Angular project that was also a pain, just slightly less of a pain. React makes it easy to create a big mess. Because I only spent 3 years in SPA land I feel quite comfortable with only shipping what the browser needs to display what the user wants. Getting JS to render everything always felt a bit odd to me.
andriusain 3y ago
React has abstracted everything that works so that you can wrap every bit of code in the 'React way of doing things' e.g. styled components, hooks, stores... so much so that we've forgotten architecture and what programming languages can do. I think if you draw a good architecture you won't need most of its fluff

React isn’t the problem. Bad architecture is the problem, eg, making everything a reducer, no separation of concerns, etc. But yes, the generalized and popular React ecosystem is a mess.

andrekandre 3y ago

> making everything a reducer just curiosity from someone whos not very experienced in react, but what are the problems with that?

selfmodruntime 3y ago
Instead of living the basic react way and gathering state in one component and passing it down as a prop to a child, you feed it into a global "state store". The child component then requests the exact state they need from the state store. This also works reversed, instead of passing "setX" as a function to a child, you just rely on them to gather the state and pass it to the store. The thought behind this is that components live in pyramids, and state and props ideally only go down and rarely up by setters-> parents and their immediate children can easily share state and props. This gets more complicated the larger your family line gets. Many grandchildren down, you have since passed the respective props via prop drilling through a lot of components that perhaps don't care for them. It also gets complicated if you want to share state not in an immediate family line, but in a neighborhood. Overdoing it is almost like hoarding. You think "eh, maybe I need this later somewhere else) and suddenly, your entire application basically lives in the global store.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Redux, and later useContext, were invented specifically to eliminate prop drilling.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    Prop drilling wouldn’t be an issue in a functional language as partial application could solve this problem. I think a lot of the issues with React in general has to do with attempting to contort JS into a functional language. useContext can lead to some gnarly code.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      The major issue, IMO, is that the DOM is just markup with an API grafted on, and so any framework attempting to add the slightest bit of composability or state management has to twist and turn itself to be compatible in all browsers. And that's how we got here, because everyone wants to make their applications available on as many platforms as possible, without having to maintain five or six separate teams that have to coordinate a roadmap, and the browser is the only somewhat consistent way to do this.
    - simonbarker87 3y ago
      > contort JS into a functional language I made something last year in a functional style as I was fresh off the back of a few React jobs and projects. I got a proof of concept working but the code was awful to work with. I took a couple of days to start over and rewrite it with OOP principles and it was in a much better state afterwards.
    - selfmodruntime 3y ago
      This is untrue. You can observe this in scalas implicits, which generate an insane mess in any medium to large codebase.
  - wmfiv 3y ago
    Right. And I think the point is that Redux is a godsend for some small percentage of products but for the vast majority the cure is worse than the disease. Simple and slightly verbose is just "better" as a general solution than the powerful but complex solutions you get with Redux.
  - airtonix 3y ago
    [dead]
- williamcotton 3y ago
  A global store isn’t necessarily a bad thing… in a functional language!
williamcotton 3y ago
It is unnecessarily complex for many problems. You can blast away state in many instances. Sure, use it for multithreaded real-time chat, but don’t use it for simple CRUD.

b33j0r 3y ago

Components are a good idea, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater! Just don’t make me develop a production site with a dev environment that falls over due to CORS for my first semester at my fancy new job ;) (And why do you call state management in stateless design “hooks?” And, and!) Web components are great, let’s build a framework around them! /sarcasm probably referencing an XKCD

simonbarker87 3y ago

Agree that React isn’t the problem, I worked on an equally large Angular project that was also a pain, just slightly less of a pain. React makes it easy to create a big mess. Because I only spent 3 years in SPA land I feel quite comfortable with only shipping what the browser needs to display what the user wants. Getting JS to render everything always felt a bit odd to me.

andriusain 3y ago

React has abstracted everything that works so that you can wrap every bit of code in the 'React way of doing things' e.g. styled components, hooks, stores... so much so that we've forgotten architecture and what programming languages can do. I think if you draw a good architecture you won't need most of its fluff