12 ms·

Does anybody like React?

• donohoe 5mo ago
  I’ve been lucky enough to avoid it. I’ve banned it at work as it is not the correct as preach for any of our work.
• domlebo70 5mo ago
  I love it. Easy to write and understand
• htsh 5mo ago
  i much prefer svelte but the rest of the world does not
  • maxbond 5mo ago
    There are dozens of us
  • jtbaker 5mo ago
    Launching a new product in SvelteKit! Coming from Vue and it has been mostly great.
  • steve_taylor 5mo ago
    I was all in on Svelte and SvelteKit until I started encountering CSS weirdness caused by a bug that the Svelte developers said is "by design", namely that components' CSS isn't removed from the document after the last instance of that component is no longer rendered. This resulted in a situation in which styles became dependent on the navigation path the user takes, leading to weird an unpredictable layout issues. I couldn't stomach solving this by using Tailwind. Then Svelte 5 came along and made Svelte more like React. At first, there were just a few simple runes, but then the runes started proliferating like crazy to solve other runes' problems. At that point, Svelte was dead to me and I went back to React/Next. The right path for Svelte to take would have been to continue to refine Svelte 4.
    • maxbond 5mo ago
      Interesting, so if I'm understanding correctly, component A's style was supposed to change when component B was present, and this was implemented as styling rules in component B? Why was Tailwind necessary rather than moving these rules to component A (which I know would probably require some gnarly selectors)? I don't want to be a "you should've double bagged it" guy, I'm just curious. Svelte is not the be all and all, if you moved on to greener pastures more power to you.
  • holler 5mo ago
    I feel the same way about ember.js :]
• Pxtl 5mo ago
  No more or less than I do the rest of the js ecosystem.
• nwah1 5mo ago
  It is the standard, and is extremely flexible. It was probably the wrong framework for most use-cases, which are often just CRUD screens. But, we are in an AI world now, so probably Javascript in general and even Typescript is starting to become the wrong move. Programming languages and frameworks which offer a ton of guarantees is what you need, now. In my humble opinion.
  • bhy 5mo ago
    Both Scala, Ocaml and some variant of Ocaml like PureScript target Javascript and even have library that wraps React. Worth to explore with AI.
  • lambdaone 5mo ago
    "Probably the wrong framework for most use-cases" is not that much of a recommendation.
• the_real_cher 5mo ago
  Its bloat. You can do shadow dom and web components in modern native JS. State library is prob all you need now.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • cube00 5mo ago
    > State library is prob all you need now. Hopefully if the signals standard proposal (TC39) gets up we may not even need state libraries soon.
    • the_real_cher 5mo ago
      Neat! Had not heard of this, lets goooo! Now if they could just make Typescript semantics native.
• moojacob 5mo ago
  I like React. And I have seriously tried the HTMX/Hotwire camp. I wanted to make a back button use browser APIs to go back if the coming from the inbox, just link to the inbox otherwise to preserve scrolling. I had to wire the actions from the html to call the function that goes back, then in my controller determine the previous page and send the JS enabled back button or the hard link. My logic was spread out over 3 files! With React I can have js in a component determine if the previous page was inbox, and based on that value show the back button JSX or the link. ALL IN ONE FILE. One conceptually entity for me to model vs 3 that do other things and this functionally is hammered in. Is it slower? Definitely. But it makes me happy. Miserable in a corporate React slopbase? Blame your coworkers, it would definitely be worse without it.
  • altbdoor 5mo ago
    I know there will probably be some complications here and there, but this could be done with Web Components too, right?
    • jimbob45 5mo ago
      Came to ask this myself. Oddly enough, I think they’ve kind of slipped under everyone’s radar.
    • kcrwfrd_ 5mo ago
      Yes you could, or even just a vanilla DOM event handler on a button click. The problem is that you cannot introspect the browser’s history with the history API. So you have to hack your way around that if you want the “go back in history if possible, otherwise navigate to fallback url” behavior. Which I guess is easier if you’re in a react SPA. Or if you’re fully a MPA and can just check document.referrer There’s a brand new Navigation API that does let you introspect history entries from the same origin, which perfectly addresses the issue. I wrote a polyfill in order to take advantage of the navigation API for this exact problem: https://github.com/kcrwfrd/navigation-ponyfill https://github.com/kcrwfrd/navigation-ponyfill
  • petcat 5mo ago
    > I wanted to make a back button use browser APIs to go back if the coming from the inbox, just link to the inbox otherwise to preserve scrolling. I had to wire the actions from the html to call the function that goes back, then in my controller determine the previous page and send the JS enabled back button or the hard link. This is why I hate react spas. They're always trying to find some stupid way to break my browsers back button and navigation buttons. I will always prefer htmx/server rendering with native everything (except the occasional form boosting.)
• adzm 5mo ago
  React is great honestly. It's a simple mental model. Hooks are fun and compose well. JSX makes sense: Astro is a great example of how something that is certainly not react still has react-like syntax and is immediately accessible to anyone with react experience.
• altbdoor 5mo ago
  I read one post before that really resonates with me, couldn't recall from where though: You love JSX, you don't love React Many of the jobs in my location requires React though, so I have to tolerate it somehow.
  • kccqzy 5mo ago
    I’m the opposite. I loved React (before its hook madness) but I hated JSX. I’ve been using a lispy language to write React since it first came out. Initially went with someone’s pet project and eventually switched to ClojureScript. If you are already tolerating a build tool to transform your code into a form browsers can run, why not switch to a better language that’s designed for nested tree structures?
    • altbdoor 5mo ago
      Interesting to know. Personally I've also been trying out other library/frameworks, like Vue, AlpineJS, or just plain server side rendering. I have heard a little about ClojureScript here and there. Will take a look at it when I am free!
  • WorldMaker 5mo ago
    There's several frameworks that use JSX but don't act like React. I definitely have found myself in the "I love JSX but don't always love React" camp. I used Cycle.JS for a while, but came back to React for the ecosystem. For what it is worth, I'm rather proud of my smaller reactive (RxJS-based) JSX alternative (Butterfloat), which is not a Virtual DOM like React or Cycle.JS (it is more "What if Knockout but TSX?"), and I am working on its second version now (among other things expanding its SSR/SSG powers, which already have a very different, I'd argue simpler, take on SSR/SSG than the Next.js/Nuxt.js/React Server Components world).
    • altbdoor 5mo ago
      Just found the link to the project: https://github.com/WorldMaker/butterfloat https://github.com/WorldMaker/butterfloat That's neat, will give it a spin in the future.
• operatingthetan 5mo ago
  Everyone I know seemed to pretend to like React because it was an avenue for making money. In other words, it was popular, but not on its merits. Next.js was the same.
• Polarity 5mo ago
  I used React back when it came out once or twice and knew, nah thats not it. It may be good for apps like Facebook. But on the other side, Facebook was slow and buggy af.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• fishtoaster 5mo ago
  As someone who lived through all major waves of JS for the last ~16 years, I do love react, in a sense: React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried. I'd take React over the Angular 1 days any time. I'd take Angular 1's full-bodied MVC over the "build it yourself from scratch every time" approach of Backbone. I'd take Backbone's minimal MVC structure over the classic JQuery Soup architecture. And I'd take JQuery's dom manipulations and standard-library improvements over the native apis (of that era) in an instant. React has its tradeoffs, but we got here after a long slog of other things that don't work.
  • veryfancy 5mo ago
    Chesterton’s framework.
  • skydhash 5mo ago
    > React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried. > React has its tradeoffs, but we got here after a long slog of other things that don't work. I strongly believe it's because of trying to achieve the wrong goal with the wrong tool. So many websites could just be bare html pages and forms with just a sprinkle of JS for some interactivity, but they want to add JS for whatever reason. If you can have a complete repo browser without JS (cgit), most web applications can survive without it too.
    • fishtoaster 5mo ago
      Sounds like your argument is with SPAs, not React in particular?
      • lambdaone 5mo ago
        SPAs are a monster that grew and grew; an idea that at first seemed like a clever optimization has generated huge and complex systems that are a nightmare to work with, and are bloated, slow and insecure. Web components are the next big idea. I hope they have a chance to work.
• skydhash 5mo ago
  I like it, but only in its truest sense: A view library. Various parts of the ecosystem are horrible even if they don't pertain to react. I like jotai because its elegant as a global state library (React context has too much boilerplate). But the thing is, React and others is useful only for a few specific cases, IMO. I would only feel the need for them if we're building truly interactive applications (Open Street Map, figma, a text editor,...), but only because they've taken care of the state management boilerplate (even if you're now boxed by their applications. But most apps on the web don't needs to be an SPA. They can actually be improved by being a multi page application with small islands of interactivity.
• cyberax 5mo ago
  I like React. I made sure that all of the interactions in our app that don't require a server round-trip are instant, without any annoying undead skeletons and animations. This works really well because we keep most of the data in RAM on the client, with IndexDB as the backing store and a custom synchronization protocol. I avoided the "server-side rendering" out of a general distrust of "magic" solutions that do everything for you. React itself is also really straightforward as a mental model of rendering.
• shimman 5mo ago
  Been using React before class components was a thing, it had its place in the sun but I truly believe react has now done more harm in holding the frontend community back than helping it. It also doesn't help that every single react codebase will always be drastically different from one another. In fact the easiest way to know the date of a react project are the dependencies one chooses in package.json. IDK if that's good or bad, but when you see bootstrap + sass in ${current_year} it's not going to be a good time. Compare this to something like Go where most projects are quite similar. Never had issues jumping in completely new Go repos but react projects are always a massive gamble toward always sucking. No solutions from me, I charge a premium working on react and there is no shortage of clients with garbage react projects needing help but can't imagine the waste of pure human effort put into maintaining such projects to begin with.
• slawton3 5mo ago
  Yes, and I won't be convinced otherwise until there is an objectively better solution.
• arikrahman 5mo ago
  I like React using by using Re-frame. It's a clever loophole to use Lisp while meeting requirements, making everyone happy.
• taintlord22 5mo ago
  [dead]
• shelled 5mo ago
  I am assuming the idea is to talk about "react" pattern/idea as well, not just that JS framework, and no, I didn't read the article - after two quotes, I scrolled and realised there was no article to read. For me, coding is feeling intuitive as a human being even when I am writing code for the computers (but also for other human beings who'll read and work on my code; not sure how much would that be post-LLM world but still...). React never felt intuitive or, say, natural to me. It "feels" upside down to me, a bit anachronistic (in some way). But as I have seen with many frameworks, or rather "paradigms", which become fashion in the end, "the tools in vogue" because that's what the largest population of coders use, this is what one usually has to use now. I was quite sad when I saw Jetpack Compose as an Android dev. Technically it had improvements over the XMLs no doubt but then seeing it was React was quite not great (at least not for me). But this is what it and one just deals with. I wish the coding world wasn't obsessed with patterns, architectures, and the need to fit everything into something concretely established (or in vogue). I often see Frankensteins as results.
  • EFLKumo 5mo ago
    Exactly what I want to say. Thank you.
• sghiassy 5mo ago
  Gets the job gone so I can focus on more important things AI writes React well too
• gobdovan 5mo ago
  What would people answer if they'd be asked if they actually like Unix? Nobody programs in literal Unix, but there's a clear before and after Unix. In the same way, there's a schism between before and after React. I personally like JSX quite a lot. Solid.js is a framework which uses JSX but drops the virtual DOM. Its creator has a course 'Reactivity with SolidJS' on Frontend masters. He's a compiler enthusiast and tells you quite a bit about how much he had to learn from the React project, which, to me, it put into perspective the kind of thinking React brought to frontend. I won't code in React myself, but I surely appreciate its massive influence on everything else.
• tail_exchange 5mo ago
  I do like React. It's still my choice even after trying other tools (including HTMX).
• FpUser 5mo ago
  I see no point in React at all. Modern JS with HTML components is all I need. I use my own state management component (basically implementation of state machine with async reentrant publish subscribe). JS dynamically loads strictly on on-need basis so no need to suck all code on initial load. In the end my front-ends are tiny, no need for build / deploy / source map and all other BS steps) and super easy to debug.
• brikym 5mo ago
  I like SvelteKit but frameworks are converging to have similar features. React has a compiler. Vue is doing away with VDOM and Svelte has 'Runes' which is a bit like Solid's signals.
  • rk06 5mo ago
    vue is adding a vdom less route. but not going away from it anytime soon
• colordrops 5mo ago
  No, I prefer much lighter frameworks that are closer to web standards, such as LitElement, which is a relatively light wrapper around Web Component standards. yes, they are slightly clunky, but they work great without a build step. I just edit the code and reload the page, no need to worry about a 5MB bundle. Unless you are writing code that is deployed to a million users running on Nokia brick phone browsers, it works great.
  • saila 5mo ago
    I have an Astro site that's mostly static with a couple interactive components. I recently converted the components from React to Lit and the result is so much simpler. One of the things that was clunky in the React version was the use of setInterval. I had to write a hook in React and it just added this unnecessary layer of weirdness in how it all interacts[1]. In the Lit version, I just use setInterval normally and there's nothing extra to understand. [1] https://overreacted.io/making-setinterval-declarative-with-react-hooks/ https://overreacted.io/making-setinterval-declarative-with-r...
  • dinfinity 5mo ago
    Another vote for Lit here. JS frameworks were invented to deal with clunkiness of Vanilla Javascript and got bloated to include everything and the kitchen sink. All of a sudden they're 'ecosystems'. Modern JS + Web components with the light layer of Lit on top solve at least 80% of the issues there were and are with just plain JS. Close to actual web standards and thus play nice with almost everything. By design they fit into a far more modular approach than React or Vue or Svelte.
• pngwen 5mo ago
  I like it just fine; so long as I am being paid to code with it. Would I use react otherwise? No. But then, I view all js work as strictly mercenary. I would never choose it willingly no matter what library sits on top of it.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• qsera 5mo ago
  ELM forever! I like ELM because the core is extremely small. You just have to remember the model, the update function and the message type. That is it. React on the other hand makes you remember a million conventions and patterns and api like useEffect, useState, hooks.
  • nilslindemann 5mo ago
    Mint? https://mint-lang.com/ https://mint-lang.com/
• Kuyawa 5mo ago
  I will never change express, ejs and postgresql for my solo projects, even AI likes to deliver in express and ejs with less clutter, easy to read, easy to make cosmetic changes when needed. I've always lived by simplicity and so does AI.
• p1necone 5mo ago
  I like react if I'm the one writing all the code. But it's too easy to write something an order of magnitude more complex than it needs to be if you don't know what you're doing. And just easy enough to maintain that complexity that you never realise you're doing something wrong.
• atum47 5mo ago
  I never liked React, but after working with it for several years, I got use to it. Specially JSX. Pretty neat to mix html and js in the same code. That actually inspired me to write tinyJS - https://github.com/victorqribeiro/tinyjs https://github.com/victorqribeiro/tinyjs Later I've a managed state, cause let's agree, it's pretty convenient to have UI updated after a change in the state.
• niam 5mo ago
  I like the React model of components being (ideally) a function of state, but I don't touch hooks where possible. And I don't use React itself when I can use the lighter Preact library instead, which provides signals as an escape hatch.
• joshuat 5mo ago
  "Does Anybody Actually Like ____" is such HN engagement bait
  • mindcrime 5mo ago
    Ask HN: "Does Anybody Actually Like HN Engagement Bait"?
  • llbbdd 5mo ago
    React, too. React or Electron in a submission title is like free money here, like throwing pellets into a koi pond.
• vjeux 5mo ago
  I'm biased because I was part of the people that made it happen but yeah, I love React. Before that, I would try everything under the sun to fix the issues I was having doing front-end. But since React came out, I don't have this need anymore. I can just focus on building stuff.
  • jdw64 5mo ago
    [dead]
• dvt 5mo ago
  I always get downvoted when I say this, but React is imo the biggest piece of astroturfed garbage corpo-slopware in the history of software engineering. It achieved such ubiquitous status for a few reasons: (1) The extreme boom of software engineering as a "get rich quick" career over the past 15 years, and it being the "default" framework for doing stuff on the web. It's so bad, in fact, that most developers these days don't even really understand the difference between a backend and a front-end. I've had to explain, from first principles, how cookies work. All these very important details are simplified or straight up buried by React and its ecosystem. (2) The overall groupthink of engineers: a lot of us will weirdly become fixated on some framework, operating system, programming language and turn into absolute zealots. This has a long and storied history (Linux vs Windows, C++ vs Java, and so on, so it's nothing new). React just happened to capture a lot of the zeitgeist even though it was objectively the wrong tool to use for like 90% of use cases. (3) Terrible alternatives. I mostly blame the W3C for this, as JQuery helpers (selectors, AJAX/websockets, etc.) should've been inducted in the DOM standard much earlier and because the W3C (and by extention, the ECMAscript committee) is essentially a beaureaucratic battleground for big tech[1], it's painfully slow to get anything passed, standards are all over the place, and everyone tries to push their own agenda (Google wants to track you, Facebook wants social stuff, Apple wants secure payments via fingerprints, etc.) (4) The startup boom of the last 15 years or so. This has always been a bit of a problem, but a common trope has been (and still very much is): if it's good enough for "huge tech company," it's good enough for us. So you've had a ton of startups that have been built from the ground up on React and the sunken cost has always been too much to switch. [1] https://www.theregister.com/software/2018/04/13/go-away-kid-you-bother-me-apple-google-microsoft-mozilla-kick-w3c-nerds-to-the-curb/541786 https://www.theregister.com/software/2018/04/13/go-away-kid-...
• beremaki 5mo ago
  I did love React for freeing me from AngularJS and I fully bought in its idiosyncrasies. But now I just use it to get paid cause it's the standard and I know it well. In my experience keeping a large React codebase simple requires some skills that are clearly not universal. If I have the choice I use Svelte because reactivity is much easier with it and it includes most of what I need to focus on building things.
• the__alchemist 5mo ago
  It depends on application complexity. I will hit a threshold. Below: HTML + CSS + targeted JS. Above: React + npm + webpack + typescript.
• talkingtab 5mo ago
  I'm not sure it is React I like. I like JSX. Here is a fun thing. Write a bunch of JSON. A lot. Now write a lot of JSX. Then convert the JSON to JSX. Then convert the JSX to JSON. I was surprised by how much easier it was for me to reason in JSX. I use threejs and react three fiber (r3f). Again the JSX type of representation easily wins out for me. I don't really understand why. Maybe JSX ends up being more pictorial - as in a picture is worth a thousand words? So I'm not sure I even care of about React. I just reason better with JSX than with all the other crufty things (template, html, htmx, etc). And yes, find all of them including React crufty.
• TheRoque 5mo ago
  I use Angular 2+, and I find it quite pleasant to use. I also like how they make the framework evolve. Not scared to have opinions (back when it came out, Typescript was barely a thing). Never got into React (but didn't try that hard to get into it), but it seems like it's a huge bloated mess.
• simonw 5mo ago
  It's interesting how all of the LLM tools seemed to default to React in 2024-2025, but this year I'm finding them much more likely to default to vanilla JS and HTML instead. (Purely based on vibes, I do not have anything robust to back this up.)
  • VerifiedReports 5mo ago
    It seems that LLM tools should make these frameworks unnecessary.
• jocelyner 5mo ago
  [dead]
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• pibaker 5mo ago
  Of course people do. No one is forced to use React or any other web framework unlike how they are practically forced to use JavaScript, and yet React wins. This should be enough evidence that people like it enough, at least more than most other frameworks out there. It is also somewhat ironic that until late 2010s a common complaint about web development is how fast it changes and how many new things are coming up all the times. It was a very valid complaint, of course. But then when the React monoculture rose to the top, and everyone decides to complain about how that sucks instead. You really can't win.
  • r0m4n0 5mo ago
    I have never been able to pick the framework and libraries for my day job. I’m almost always working on something someone started years prior or bound to an organization that has strict choices. Personally I wouldn’t pick react :) React wins because it has become a default choice and folks like what’s comfortable to their preferences
    • curtisblaine 5mo ago
      React wins because it has a predictable interface that has become industry standard. Industry standard saves money. Not everything must be creative.
      • pjmlp 5mo ago
        Not very predicatble with Vercel ownership.
      • owebmaster 5mo ago
        React is bad exactly because this predictability doesn't exist, it changed radically for the worse at least 2 times without any consultation to the community
    • pibaker 5mo ago
      I mean, that means someone at your work liked React enough to choose it over the alternatives. I see a lot of personal projects, solo founder applications etc running made in React. I respect your opinion but other people definitely do choose it when they have fully control of what they use.
• c-smile 5mo ago
  What if: 1. JS supports JSX literals so let elDef = <div id="some">Text</div>; will be compiled into let elDef = ["div", {id:"some"}, ["Text"]]; 2. We extend DOM API to accept such constructs: element.append(elDef); // same thing as element.append("<div id=some>Text</div>"); element.prepend(elDef); // ditto element.patch(elDef); // patch element's DOM by elDef 3. Add appropriate events: componentDidMount, componentWillUnmount, etc. for cases when tag in JSX (uppercased) resolves to a class or function. 4. Add render() support. A method that generates tree of elDef's. It gets called by append(),prepend() and patch(). And we will get native React implementation. This will be quite useful and allowed to marry React alike approach with WebComponents into single mechanism. 1...4 is how it is implemented in my Sciter as the Reactor thing, see: https://docs.sciter.com/docs/Reactor/ https://docs.sciter.com/docs/Reactor/
  • WorldMaker 5mo ago
    If you are making it native to the browser, why have a "virtual DOM" "definition language" middleman and not just jump straight to real DOM, the browser's existing bread and butter? let ele = <div id="some">Text</div> // ele is now HTMLDivElement Doing that `element.append(ele)` just works with existing DOM APIs. Instead of supporting classes and functions in browser-supported JSX with their own life cycle model, you can just require registered Web Components and reuse existing Web Component life cycles. I think if Browser-native JSX support were to happen it should probably either be real DOM or remain a function tree so that at least some tree operations can be amortized by the function compiler. Which is that most JSX is actually compiled to nested calls like: let elDef = jsx("div", {id:"some"}, "Text", jsx("div", {id: "inner"}, "Text2"), ...otherChildren) The `jsx` function can potentially avoid some future tree walks/recursion by the nature of being unrolled by the compiler into nested calls instead. That's a useful property lost in trying to agree on a single virtual tree definition. It's also one maybe unnecessary if just relying on real DOM trees, because browsers have their own optimizations for DOM tree walking.
• jdw64 5mo ago
  I'm really sorry to say this, but I actually love React
• neko_ranger 5mo ago
  React really shines once you embrace graphql and have components pass graphql fragments upward so that components can easily query for the data it needs, and the backend only gets one query per view. React is really annoying if you're doing REST. It didn't click until I saw a react+graphql project, and it makes sense why meta created react and graphql
• pveierland 5mo ago
  Shout-out to the React Compiler for those that have not tried it. It's very easy to configure and can automatically deal with many cases of useMemo / useCallback / memo to reduce boilerplate in code: https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler
• skybrian 5mo ago
  I like JSX and I prefer Preact to React because it's smaller, but I haven't used React itself enough to know if I'm missing anything. Currently I'm using hono/jsx, mostly on the server, which seems like an even simpler way to do it than Preact. The JSX looks pretty much the same.
• sheepscreek 5mo ago
  Yes! It is hands-down, the most intuitive interface, that has successfully married declarative and imperative styles together. IMO, nothing comes close to JSX across the length and breadth of UI frameworks across all languages.
  • MrBuddyCasino 5mo ago
    If it is so intuitive, why then does basically every React app contain performance bugs?
    • Rohansi 5mo ago
      What does being intuitive have to do with software optimization? You can write poorly performing code for anything. Most people never touch profilers.
      • MrBuddyCasino 5mo ago
        The same kind of bugs don’t happen in Vue because the framework handles them for you.
        • anon7000 5mo ago
          Maybe fair maybe not, but definitely unrelated to how intuitive it is.
          • Timon3 5mo ago
            I'd argue that it's directly related. If intuitive use of a library/framework/pattern commonly causes issues, you have to keep forcing yourself to do use non-intuitive approaches to prevent them. GOTO is also pretty intuitive.
            • sheepscreek 5mo ago
              It’s intuitive in the same way Ruby is intuitive, or C, yes, C, is intuitive. They try to give you the vocabulary to be expressive, then get the hell out of your way. You can still shoot yourself in the foot with them, of course. I think that has more to do with the design goals of the language. C was designed to be raw and simple, and it does that well. Ruby was designed to read almost like English prose, and it does that well. Rust was specifically designed to make it hard to shoot yourself in the foot, and it does that well too. I don’t think that was ever a major React design goal. PropTypes helped a bit, but these days TypeScript carries most of the burden of saving developers from themselves. Anyway, React is far from perfect. But JSX was a neat invention that alleviated the tension between `<div>something</div>` and let el = document.createElement(‘div’); el.innerHTML(‘something’);
• sergiotapia 5mo ago
  React was incredible right until the end of the class based react components. It all became fucky really quickly past that point. These days I feel React is a tool that is foisted upon me, not one I choose on technical merits.
• AnonHP 5mo ago
  [dead]
• righthand 5mo ago
  No
  • righthand 5mo ago
    Not really.
• JSR_FDED 5mo ago
  React removed the joy of web development from me. Datastar brought it back.
• mbgerring 5mo ago
  React seemed like a bad idea when it came out, and a much worse idea once I started using it day to day. All of my personal projects use Svelte, and I finally, blessedly applied for a job recently where Svelte was their frontend framework of choice. htmx also felt great the one time I used it. HTML, CSS and a scripting language inly for progressive enhancement are such beautiful, pure ideas, and learning frontend at the height of the web standards movement made me a partisan of using these technologies as intended. But these days, doing it that way feels like building a house with Japanese joinery techniques.
• cadamsdotcom 5mo ago
  > Critical Security Vulnerability in React Server Components RSC isn’t React. > Next.js 15.1+ is unusable outside of Vercel Next.js isn’t React. By contrast to nextjs, React + Vite is quite a nice combo. Maybe Bun or Deno are also good? But nextjs and RSC should be kept separate from the discussion. With React I find there is usually a clear and simple way to achieve what you want, and while it doesn’t perform super well, my customers get more value from a maintainable codebase than a fast one - because I can add features faster.
  • rk06 5mo ago
    why is RSC not considered react? it is designed by core React team, and heavily recommended by core React team. and needs deep support from react.
    • cadamsdotcom 5mo ago
      Doesn’t mean you have to use it.
    • jamesrr39 5mo ago
      Subjective depending on who you ask, but for me RSC is not really representative of React usage. (I believe) the vast majority of React apps (and the vast majority of dev experience in React) are front end only. I have been writing React in some form for 8+ years, but never touched RSC.
      • pjmlp 5mo ago
        It is, especially in big corps doing MACH with SaaS products, deploying into Vercel.
  • z3ratul163071 5mo ago
    this a million times. the next.js intermixing of backend / frontend code is a security nightmare.
  • nicce 5mo ago
    > Next.js isn’t React. But it seems becoming. Many React maintainers are on Vercel's payroll and Next.js is also defining where React is going.
• darkteflon 5mo ago
  I’m not an FE engineer but have found myself working very closely with the whole stack recently, which includes an SPA. We use html, JavaScript, Alpine for reactivity and Supabase realtime subscriptions. It seems … okay? I feel like I can reason about it. But I worry I’m missing something that’s going to come back and bite us later because we haven’t adopted a framework. Roast my stack?
  • asp_hornet 5mo ago
    Would be silly to rate your stack without knowing more about what it is and its constraint. If I had to judge it based on this alone post alone: Great, seems like a straight forward stack. Would happily work on it. Only criticism, to get all the ergonomics out of alpine, you sometimes have to lax some CSP or use the CSP build. Not necessarily a deal breaker, it is what it is.
  • mfru 5mo ago
    I think this is a very sane stack. Will probably become a hassle when going planet-scale (tm), but I think for most use cases this should be fine.
• rtpg 5mo ago
  I kinda like react with hooks but I do miss Angular 1 watches. Explicit watch expressions solve a loooot of spurious rerendering nonsense that makes for a lot of churn Ultimately I think React makes it too hard for the performant solution to be used. And then tries to handwave it all away with “the react compiler solves/will solve it”. Don’t even get me started on “useMemo is not semantics” rationalization. First time runs actually matter when working on a performant UI! DOM ops are expensive but your little bespoke function component code is also expensive when some hook leads to recalcs all over.
• Hfuffzehn 5mo ago
  I haven't really deeply thought about frontend JS for many years. Back then the question we were looking at was whether it would be good idea to move away from SAP UI5. The alternatives back then where React, Angular and Vue. The conclusion we came to was that it was definitely worth to migrate, but to what was not so easy to agree on. Right now I am working with a legacy Java codebase that was based on RxJava. And every single day I am cursing the people that made that decision. It seems so obviously a bad idea. And the only thing that lets me keep my sanity is remembering that every decision only becomes obvious with hindsight. So I guess the only thing I can contribute is that it could always be worse and sometimes making the bold and seemingly innovative decision comes back many years later to bite other people.
• nurettin 5mo ago
  I loved react in 2013 when it had the life cycle methods. Everything was deterministic, I knew what caused what where and when. Now every framework is a mess and I'm glad I won't have to learn anyone's crap anymore thanks to random code generators.
  • adjejmxbdjdn 5mo ago
    I lived there idea of hooks when they were introduced. But they’ve honestly not worked out. React works have been a lot better if the React team has figured out what useEffect was supposed to be right at the beginning, or at least when they changed what it was supposed to be used for they documented that clearly instead of gaslighting devs into believing nothing has changed. Also, hooks aren’t a thing. Each hook is its own API and concept. Grouping them under the umbrella term “hooks” gave the wrong impression that it was a single concept, but there’s No conceptual similarity between ushered, useState or useEffect. The only similarity are the restrictions on their use and nomenclature.
    • pjmlp 5mo ago
      In every single project I worked on using Next.js as a kind of full stack framework, eventually I need to do something on the FE as well, and end up debugging a spaghetti of useSomething() until I figure out where to actually implement what I need.
• joeyguerra 5mo ago
  Some people do, some people don't.
• slopinthebag 5mo ago
  React is fine. The shit people add to it (including the React team!) sucks tho. Raw react is just declarative UI. Server components, state management libraries, data fetching libraries, routers, etc, are horrible. Same with most UI libraries. They add so much overhead and complexity.
• futuredevtech 5mo ago
  React is probably the most successful framework people constantly complain about.
• platevoltage 5mo ago
  React is great, and really the only good thing Meta has ever done.
• gdotdesign 5mo ago
  Initially I didn't see the value in React. I thought that the whole virtual DOM compiling on every change was a waste of resources instead of just doing the change itself directly. But as it turns out it's a great abstraction worth using for the right things (not every part of the web) and one of those are Single Page Applications. A lot of comments here are about people linking JSX instead of React and that's a good abstraction too. In Mint (https://mint-lang.com/ https://mint-lang.com/) I'm trying to create a language for SPAs and having HTML syntax helps.
• suis_siva 5mo ago
  One of the talks I really enjoyed is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9SDuTSy7ps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9SDuTSy7ps. In my experience, React's architecture is really good and lends itself quite well to making large applications. Unfortunately, React's biggest problem is that it forces you into the JS/TS ecosystem, which is, without a doubt in my mind, a compilation target rather than a system I wish to interact with natively. I'm happy with Elm -- the community is really small, and sometimes you have to roll your own libraries. TEA is sometimes... unnatural (coming from React), but the fact that you do not have to worry about implicit and unexpected state (see useEffect), I always get excited to work with Elm. Additionally, Claude seems to manage itself better in Elm than in React, at least within large, scary codebases.
  • 0x6c6f6c 5mo ago
    I like TEA but don't fully grasp how it scales for apps that may have reusable components or sufficiently complex pages. Is there an agreed-upon way(s) to deal with this? I know state is a big NO so it seems a bit at odds, but also does this essentially mean all Elm apps are just a global Redux and React app with no effects? Curious about more details to what you enjoy and how you like to work in Elm. Links also perfectly fine too.
    • qsera 5mo ago
      Not the person you were asking, but I shall share my experienc.. >how it scales for apps that may have reusable components or sufficiently complex It is a lot of boilerplate, but it is mechanical, straightforward changes. I think it is entirely possible to automate it (not even using LLM). > state.. I have used ELM ports to interact with JS and localstorage/indexeddb.
    • suis_siva 5mo ago
      In my experience, the biggest problem in Elm is how unintuitive TEA's docs are. In some ways, Elm really feels like Haskell -- you want to avoid creating "stateful" modules and you prefer stateless modules. For example, https://harmont.dev's https://harmont.dev's app (landing page is not Elm) has a component to render a pipeline graph called DagGraph. In React, you'd do something like function DagGraph() { const steps = useState<Jobs[]>([]); const selectedJobIdx = useState<number | null>(null); return ...; } In elm, I lift this up (I will keep using React syntax for the sake of wider-audience readability) function DagGraph({ steps, selectedJobIdx } : IDagGraphModel) { return ...; } This allows for better testability of the graph view. The parent then injects the model function PipelinePage({ graphMode, selectedPipeline }: IPipelineModel) { return ( graphMode === GraphMode.DagView ? <DagGraph steps={selectedPipeline.steps} selectedJobIdx={selectedPipeline.selectedStep} /> : <TableView steps={selectedPipeline.steps} selectedJobIdx={selectedPipeline.selectedStep} /> ); } Now -- we need to bubble up the selected pipeline index based on when the user clicks a node in the DAG view. I personally prefer to do this completely orthogonally to the view rendering pipeline (which remains mostly pure). I create a new model, and define the message relationships to it: namespace PipelineState { interface Model { steps: Step[]; selectedStep: number | null; }; interface ISelectStepMessage { stepIdx: number }; interface IUnselectStepMessage; type Message = ISelectStepMessage | IUnselectStepMessage; function update(m: Model, msg: Message): Model { return...; } } // main model interface Model { pipeline: PipelineState.Model, } type Message = PipelineState.Message | SomeOtherMessage | ...; function update(m: Model, msg: Message): Model { switch (msg) { case PipelineState.Message as msg: return update(m, msg); ... } } And this seems to work quite well. Personally, I really like this architecture, because it enables me to think about state and UI separately. One of the really big gripes I have with React is how most components end up with `useEffect` and `useState`, and then immediately become untestable. Elm literally doesn't allow for that. At the end of the day, there's a trade-off -- my logic is no longer localized to the "component" relevant to rendering the pipeline DAG. I never have one file open editing Elm code, but I'm a vim user so it doesn't bother me. In some ways, semantically, I think it makes sense to split the "state backend" of your UI from your UI, in my opinion. Most of my app states are represented as state machines (coming from embedded this is quite natural) and UI is represented as pure transformations of that state. With Elm, it really feels like you reason about state and UI separately, and I actually prefer that, both for testability and that's just how my brain works.
• nsonha 5mo ago
  I think mostly people like to have logical component with all the code in one place and not have to think about structuring css/html/js separately. Many people like react for jsx (surprisingly, because initially there was a lot of push back even in early react adoption). Then they took it to the next level with things like styled-component. Virtual DOM is just an implementation detail and overrated to the success of React. Any future web framework that solves that component thing and allow people to just write code instead of "web code", they'll win. (I am aware that the web veterans don't like that view)
• kenanfyi 5mo ago
  I think so, because it's created in Meta, thus having a huge developer base already and spread its way out of there. If you earn your life writing it, because your employer forces you to do so and you never try other stuff that long, you end up liking it. I have never found the idea of having a Virtual DOM and diffing in runtime a good solution to the problem, maybe that's why I never liked React. I mean if you are writing a lot of code, have an enormous build step already and use a bloated library, why not have it compiled too anyway. That's why I like the thinking behind Svelte.
  • hajile 5mo ago
    I remember when React's vdom renderer was faster than anyone and it wasn't even close. InfernoJS uses a vdom and is still one of the fastest JS frameworks out there, so I don't know that diffing is always inherently slower.
• pjmlp 5mo ago
  No, it is forced upon me when SaaS vendors only support Next.js/React as official way to extend their product. It is gotten weird after Vercel's take over development, with all the "use whatever", which is getting out of hand. Also the whole functional spaghetti is bonkers.
• curtisblaine 5mo ago
  I do. Reading React is an uniform experience across all the codebases. You know what state is, what an effect is, what a rendering function is and what it looks like. You also know where code smells are, there's a whole section of eslint rules dedicated to that. Compare to hand-rolled frameworks, where everything is all over the place, and you have to navigate tons of indirection to understand the brilliant intuition du jour by some developer who was bored and wanted to inject a spark of creativity in their code. Give me predictability, and keep creativity for hobby stuff that nobody has to read.
• manlymuppet 5mo ago
  More than React, I'm interested in the question of how to best write UI through code, in general. Even though I'm a fan of React, and use it for practically every web application I build, my biggest and most obvious issue has been that writing UIs through React doesn't feel as natural as, say, writing command line tools in Go, or live/realtime apps in Elixir. Some languages just feel incredibly natural and frictionless for certain things, and nobody has really nailed UIs yet. Swift, JSX/HTML, Svelte, or whatever framework of the week: they all feel like they're working around the problem to some extent. Like at some point in the process, the designers of the language/framework had to compromise and implement some hacky/weird/painful syntax to satisfy project requirements. UI's natural interface is visual, so tools like Figma can serve as an essential part of the solution, but nonetheless, I feel there's something missing. There must be a more intuitive way to represent the visual through code. The current solutions, although I find it hard to describe precisely, are always tantalizingly lacking in one way or another.
  • bakugo 5mo ago
    As an engineer, it's easy to look at every problem and think to yourself: "There is a perfect solution for this, we just haven't found it yet." Yet, as the years go by, I find myself accepting a less idealistic answer: Maybe there isn't. Maybe the problem space is just so complex that no one (humanly feasible) general solution exists for all forms of it. If there's one thing that this is true for, UI is probably it.
    • manlymuppet 5mo ago
      Years are a pretty short time frame as it relates to technology, though. Even for software. The solution might be well out of grasp now, but think 10, 20, 100 years from now. Somebody smart with a new perspective will eventually come around and tear out the roots, and we'll all be better for it. Perhaps what's holding us back isn't the problem itself, but the way we approach it and the assumptions we bring. Trying is at least worth the effort, especially since "better" is very achievable, rather than total perfection.
  • mpweiher 5mo ago
• DeathArrow 5mo ago
  I don't like it. I prefer Svelte and VUE.
• shikck200 5mo ago
  There is many "like react" things out there. I avoid full fledged frameworks like the pest, but something like solid.js is probably the one that matches how i think of webdev.
• zarzavat 5mo ago
  People hate on React because it's popular. That popularity alienates people whose use cases aren't served well by React and they wonder what the fuss is about. But React is really, really good at the thing it was designed for: building interactive UIs. You can even build native apps. Can you build a native app in htmx? Most of the alternatives to React are simplifying alternatives. They aim to take complexity away in order to solve a subset of basic use cases with less ceremony. Sure, if you have uncomplicated needs then use whatever solves your problem, web components, HTMX, Jinja, plain HTML, markdown: go as low as you like down the hierarchy and choose the simplest thing that could possibly work. But nobody as of yet has built an alternative to React that can solve the difficult use cases better than React. Au contraire, React has moved into domains that it was never even designed for. Native apps. Terminal apps. That's the power of a good abstraction.
• martin-adams 5mo ago
  React was one of those ways of building software that gave me back the giddy excitement I had learning Visual Basic as a kid. It’s hard to explain, but the way everything was encapsulated as a component just clicked for me and suddenly the whole app could be composed. I think it was when they introduced functional components. And when it comes to hooks, I love them. Not to say other frameworks didn’t do the same, there was something special about React.
• throwaway2037 5mo ago
  Hat tip to the article's subtitle: > A cherry-picked collection of React (and React-tainted) criticism. I appreciate the honesty up front!
• keyle 5mo ago
  It's called Stockholm syndrome...
• ChiperSoft 5mo ago
  I used to absolutely love react. Then I spent two years breaking apart a monolithic SPA into a bunch of federated micro frontends, and I saw the darkside of where React monoculture can go. When your entire website runs in the framework, complexity goes through the roof. After I was laid off I realized that what I actually loved about react was JSX components, so I wrote a template engine on top of JSX and started doing server side rendering in my own apps. It's a quiet life
• outlore 5mo ago
  A post about React?! Nature is healing
• hieKVj2ECC 5mo ago
  After spending so long writing React code, I'm now working on a large Vue project at work. Everyone used to say Vue was the easier of the two, the more approachable option — but I'm starting to see it differently. React, in its elegance, gives you components that are essentially just functions — and beyond that, there's not much more to it (setting aside the whole Next.js ecosystem). It's the most elegant thing I've encountered in frontend development. Vue, on the other hand, feels like a jumble. You can tell it was clearly adopted and glorified by backend developers who didn't want to properly learn JavaScript — and what emerged is this awkward mashup that never quite coheres into something clean.
  • b4ckup 5mo ago
    I never get this take. A react component is not just a function, it's a function plus a magically injected context that is accessed through hooks which requires all kinds of guarantees that you have to be aware of otherwise it will have hard to debug consequences. Imo it's anything but elegant. I did projects in all major frameworks and am building a huge angular web app currently. In angular a component is represented as a class plus template (plus styles). A event listener is mostly calling a method on the class. A state can be as simple as a property on the class. It's very natural and there are way less caveats (although not zero).
    • TonyStr 5mo ago
      Maybe you would prefer React's class-based syntax. It's still there if you want to use it
      • b4ckup 5mo ago
        I actually do and my critique is directed at function components which seems to be the standard nowadays.
    • mpweiher 5mo ago
      > I never get this take. A react component is not just a function, Exactly. I did a somewhat longer writeup a while back. https://blog.metaobject.com/2018/12/uis-are-not-pure-functions-of-model.html https://blog.metaobject.com/2018/12/uis-are-not-pure-functio... The pull request is still open :-)
• throwaway2037 5mo ago
  This is my favourite quote (and I write this as someone with no experience with HTML frameworks): > How to build a counter component using the HTML Framework in just 1 line of code > Locate your /node_modules folder and drag it to the trash bin. > Scott Jehl > 5th October 2024
• ManBeardPc 5mo ago
  It was an improvement in some regards, but a pita most of the time. Before I had to work on an Angular project React was my least favorite frontend library. Solid.js gave me back my sanity (also Svelte 5). Fast, small, includes what I need and feels like just writing JS/TS. Sadly businesses love to torture their developers, themselves and users too much, so React/Angular it is.
• mads_quist 5mo ago
  Why does the blog prompts me to install it as an app?
• cantalopes 5mo ago
  No
• dominicrose 5mo ago
  I like scripting so I like having a <div id=root> and then do everything in JS. No need for Typescript or React, innerHTML=`...` works fine. For a serious project, React and Typescript make sense but it can still be used wrong. The default Laravel project that's generated when choosing React looks really bad to me. Too many files and comments and tests. It's over-engineered.
• ruduhudi 5mo ago
  I actually like React's virtual DOM approach. It might not be the fastest possible solution, not the most elegant syntax, not particularly concise. but I can at least understand what it does and how data flows. I learned the hard way that with reactive programming (whether you call it observables, runes, signals, whatever) you can lose that understanding and it's a huge pain when that happens.
  • ruduhudi 5mo ago
    No Server Components though, they are the pinnacle of too clever to be a good idea.
• rbbydotdev 5mo ago
  Open source tech is a marketplace of ideas. If you have a more perfect alternative then it will prevail. Granted none of these critics have a viable tried and true alternative. It’s easy to throw shade at any abstraction. None will ever be perfect! That said, I welcome any new paradigms and ideas. But discounting how far we’ve come with what’s possible on the frontend with hand waves just doesn’t cut it for me.
  • derfurth 5mo ago
    I am wondering how much the "perfect alternative then it will prevail" still holds given the amount of money spent on marketing by infrastructure companies, for example Vercel that have an interest in promoting Next.
    • rbbydotdev 5mo ago
      That’s a fair take. What happened to google’s angular ? Facebook is also historically invested in php, why wasn’t php just good enough? Facebook also had flow, Microsoft typescript won. Sure these companies have influence, but it’s not all or nothing. I just don’t buy the whole mass hysteria and funding being responsible for reacts prevalence. “Frontend purity” reeks of the tired, “lazy unskilled engineers should write software in C and assembly on 16kb memory like the old days” Reacts success is not from being an air tight optimized and perfect abstraction, it succeeds because it has a scalable abstractions which have relatively good ROI when you learn it even with its warts.
  • youngtaff 5mo ago
    > Open source tech is a marketplace of ideas. If you have a more perfect alternative then it will prevail. React has had Facebook promoting it for over a decade… it's hardly a marketplace of ideas… more "Facebook is using this so it must be good enough for us"
  • iammrpayments 5mo ago
    What you mean there’s no viable alternative to react? Is this a joke?
• watwut 5mo ago
  I do actively like it. I even prefer the functional style better then class based one.
• downsplat 5mo ago
  I basically skipped React. I went from jquery to Vue3, and use even that sparingly. When React got really popular, I read the docs and played with it, but I prefer the Vue model where the component runs once and sets up its reactive tree. Why would you want to recreate the component's inner functions every time it renders? And manually declare dependencies, when every other framework is doing them automatically? My favourite front-end architecture is MPA actually mostly server-rendered, with Vue only on the pages that need high interactivity, and vanilla JS on the others.
• lucideer 5mo ago
  I like React. I also hate React for many reasons, but I mostly like it because I genuinely believe React is the only front-end system I've used that got the fundamentals correct - they've just gotten many other trivial-but-still-annoying things wrong. The fundamentals: - no magic: this is a trend that the JS community has picked up I think from Ruby or maybe just Rails, but having a framework pick things up automatically depending on how you've placed them (directory structure, DSL files without explicit exports, etc.) means you need to learn each framework's magic independently & upgrade paths are harder when magic changes. React is just javascript - components are stored in variables, your app container is a native dom primitive & you need to call the render explicitly. This makes your entry points clear & idiomatic, & ensures your framework stands the test of time. - composable (& somewhat fungible) primitives: React components are JS objects, there's certainly some elements of the underlying lifecycle implementation that's abstracted away once they're passed to the rendered, but at definition time they're just objects - they can be passed around, inspected, manipulated & ultimately they're not abstracted away & hidden from the dev. - modular DSL: I'm suspicious of DSLs in general but if you're going to create a DSL, JSX is a masterclass in how to do it. 100% independent of React - you can use JSX without React or React without JSX. This modularity has lead to JSX getting broad high-quality third-party tooling support that all other front-end frameworks lack. - imperative DSL. This is a bonus but the design of JSX is ingenious. Declarative systems are the dominant trend: everyone wants to create a well-defined strictly static language to define their front-end, but that design goal doesn't match reality. JSX isn't declarative: it's an extension of javascript, tags are function calls, attributes are params. This makes it incredibly expressive - I could write my backend in JSX if I wanted to (could be a fun experiment). The bad: - class-based components. This is less of a React problem & more of an ECMA problem but shoehorning Java-style classical inheritance models into javascript was always a bad idea & React was the main proponent of this style when it was popular. Thankfully we've moved past this phase & modern React no longer does this. - lifecycle methods: these were tied to class components so were always going to end up becoming deprecated when classes went away but they also had other annoying fundamental issues - too complex to go into in detail here but their operation was highly abstracted which made debugging really painful - hooks: the modern replacement for much of the lifecycle method functionally isn't much better. Thankfully hooks are mainly used for state management, which has always been an "added extra" in the React world (see e.g. flux), so you can minimise your hook usage & avoid a lot of friction if you're clever & careful.
• machuz 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• cyco130 5mo ago
  I can see where the arguments for React's alternatives like Preact, Vue, Svelte, Solid, etc. come from. All of them are better than React at least in one aspect and React's dominance is mostly due to inertia: Developers (and now LLMs) know it better and the ecosystem is richer. But having built websites and apps since before jQuery times, I strongly disagree with manual DOM manipulation as an alternative. Declarative, component-based approach won for a reason. These frameworks allow you to tell how the UI should look based on the state and manages the transition (either via virtual DOM diffing or fine-grained reactivity) for you. DOM manipulation requires you to write some code for every single state transition (instead of every _state_). And, in practice, it becomes unmanageable very fast, and you give up, and start writing code like `element.innerHTML = ...`, causing problems with focus and event management. It's fine for small widgets, even enjoyable, but only until you need to manage a complex UI. Then, you end up with a mess of code that is hard to maintain and debug. I know some still feel web is not the right platform for building complex UIs but that battle was lost more than two decades ago. Web is good. It comes with accessibility features (like zooming) and works everywhere. As someone with age-related farsightedness, I hate native apps that don't allow me to zoom in with a passion (which is, almost all of them). Of course I hate websites that don't allow me to zoom even more because they had to go out of their way to disable a basic browser feature. But getting decent accessibility is harder with native apps. You basically have to build everything yourself. Web gets you 90% there for free. React might not be the best out there and might be, one day, replaced by one of the competitors or something new. But declarative, component-based UI development is not going anywhere.
• po1nt 5mo ago
  I used to love react of old with redux/flux and little to no hooks and weird side effects. It had super sound software design at the cost of being bulky. I think we should return back to that with the era of LLMs. We don't write the code anyway. Let's use reducers and fully event sourced states.
• Havoc 5mo ago
  No particularly strong feelings either way. It suffers from the same issue as all the other JS frontend - it evolved along with browsers over years and was constrained by whatever browsers happened to support rather than from a cohesive design
• cess11 5mo ago
  I prefer HTML over JSX, and AlpineJS is good enough. Sometimes it's nice to have a few web components. I've helped juniors learn React as part of their studies and when they then come to intern with me they become happier once they learn other ways of making things happen on the screen.
• dev_l1x_be 5mo ago
  I only migrated projects from React to something more sensible. I am not sure why people like it. Maybe it is good for bigger teams. Astro with OpenProps is what is super simple, fast to develop and maps naturally to the business functionality I work on most of the time. I have no idea why people go for these super heavy frameworks. Maybe there are some aspects I am not considering that justifies React.
• darqis 5mo ago
  Sure, I also love Vue and Angular and Svelte. But React has the largest ecosystem
• duxup 5mo ago
  It’s the best of the options that I’ve tried. So I guess I like it.
• jessyco 5mo ago
  People may like it; I do not. But who cares?
• ianmarcinkowski 5mo ago
  My journey. Raw PHP + SQL Queries -> Python + server-side rendered HTML -> Ruby/Python APIs + ugly JS frontends -> Python + EmberJS (remember that?!) -> Go/Ruby/Python/I don't care anymore + React. My problems with React are more about JS/TS and how other devs (it's never me! I swear!) can write terrible code that passes tests and isn't readable or maintainable. The JS Tradeoff is that we can handle rapidly evolving web landscape, but we have to deal with NPM and supply-chain hacks periodically. shrug I am fine with the complexities of events, hooks and re-renders in React because we want to build interactive programs and nothing comes for free. Data fetching libraries like Tanstack Query solve one of the hardest problems of cache invalidation/re-rendering. React was the thing that made me actually enjoy making interfaces for users. I just want to build stuff. I experiment a bit with HTMX for my super simple single-page tools with some basic javascript, Next.js is nice but kind of thirsty to get you to use Vercel, I like Flask-Admin for really simple tools that must render a page from a server-hosted application.
• majora2007 5mo ago
  What's interesting to me is that it seems a lot of people got burned by AngularJs (Angular 1) and now swear off Angular as a whole. Like many, I came from pre-SPA days -> AngularJs -> Angular 2 -> Modern Angular. I tried react a few times, plus React Native but found it hard. I wasn't good with a slightly different render-syntax (whereas Angular uses HTML) and every project I was on was wildly different from each other. Modern Angular has been wonderful. A lot of the pain points people have are gone, some good parts of other frameworks (signals, single-components vs modules, etc) have been incorporated and embraced.
  • WorldMaker 5mo ago
    For what it is worth, I missed AngularJS/Angular 1 and managed to use Aurelia to avoid several versions of Angular 2+. When I did get eventually pressured into working on Angular it was a nightmare for several reasons. One of them was I got hugely burnt by Zone.js. Angular is finally doing something about Zone.js years after my warning. (Though it took Signals to push them to do it, which is another rant because Signals are just dumber Observables and Angular already has an RxJS dependency.) > (whereas Angular uses HTML) Angular has as complex a template language as any other major framework. The fact that it uses .html files is a convenient lie to make it seem like it is "just HTML". Its template compiler is a far more complex beast than JSX. (And it doesn't have anything like half the type safety of TSX.)
    • em-bee 5mo ago
      happy to see another fan of aurelia here. i actually started with angular 1 before it became popular. i evaluated the alternatives at the time, knockout, ember and a few others, and angularjs just looked the best. finally when angular 1 was no longer maintained i discovered aurelia, in part because rob eisenberg had an interesting story about how he got invited to the angular team because of his ideas, and how he left again because he could not actually get his ideas implemented. it's a bit disappointing that development of aurelia 2 is slow going, but in some ways i consider that a good thing, considering how fast vue and svelte are evolving away from what they were originally. i need to look at solid.js though. the only promising newcomer in resent years if the state of js survey is any indication.
• gherkinnn 5mo ago
  React is fine. It's main problem is a lack of guardrails to stop bad engineering cultures from doing stupid things.
• bryanhogan 5mo ago
  I really like Svelte and have been using SvelteKit for more complex apps. I've found it to be a great improvement over many cases where I would have used React before. Svelte feels much easier to learn for someone who already knows the basics of web development, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But nowadays I often see people start learning web development by learning React, which feels a bit backwards. Personally I have been using SvelteKit + Capacitor to build mobile apps, wrote about the setup here: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/web-to-app-sveltekit-capacitor https://bryanhogan.com/blog/web-to-app-sveltekit-capacitor For simple landing pages I like to use Astro though.
  • yawnxyz 5mo ago
    Svelte + Astro is the combo for me - this combo is great for documentation sites and pages w/ selective amounts of interactivity
  • division_by_0 5mo ago
    I also always reach for Svelte + SvelteKit (Using Kit for simple apps can be overkill, but it's nice to have when things get complex unexpectedly). > But nowadays I often see people start learning web development by learning React, which feels a bit backwards. I think Svelte prevents this nicely by treating HTML as the mother language. If someone started web dev with Svelte(Kit), they would probably learn more about the fundamentals than they would with React.
• leke 5mo ago
  My company is currently using PHP templates, but is thinking of replacing them with react components because the new front-end devs like them. Is this a bad idea?
• justinbeaudry 5mo ago
  IMO, in the age of agents, all we need is HTML, CSS, and common patterns to build our JavaScript.
• snikeris 5mo ago
  I use it through reagent and re-frame. I don't have any complaints.
• dzonga 5mo ago
  1. use web-components 2. if one is too much then use Svelte to make 1. Svelte works perfectly okay with other JS libraries without needing wrappers. 3. use Vue if things get political(i.e we need devs) if you need to play around but u can also use Vue to make 1. 1000xxx. if you tokens to burn & VC money to burn the use React - since your decisions are influenced by politics of the day and not pleasing your users.
• brachkow 5mo ago
  Here are the things I don't like in React. Keep in mind that React is a framework to draw interactive HTML on screen, not for some crazy programming. 1. Over-reliance on complex concepts and terminology. Let's compare with Vue: `useEffect` vs `watch`, `useMemo` vs `computed`. 2. This useless "clever" stuff also slips beyond terminology: many years ago, Redux was considered the go-to state manager, and it required writing a lot of code across multiple files even for incrementing a number, because its author liked a lot of clever CS concepts. VueX at the same time allowed just to increment that number. Thankfully, nowadays, the React ecosystem is full of sane state managers. 3. React ships without any tools to work with CSS. That said there is no chance you would use React without CSS. 4. React doesn't bother optimizing anything for you. You need to know how and when to properly use or not use these clever `useEffect` and `useMemo`. There is a lot of stuff to know, and there are a lot of folk legends about optimizing React. This is while rerendering is its main purpose. In Vue, the framework makes you always use its tools, and does most of the optimizations inside them. I never thought about manually optimizing a Vue app. 5. The folk legends. React API and the "correct way" to write React radically changed so many times, so it is very hard to understand what is still true today and what is not. All of that can be summarized into one – React is overly focused on ideas, computer science, and being high-level. And not very focused on actually making drawing interactive HTML on screen simple. I do write a lot of React, Vue, and Svelte. And when I write React I always need to think about stuff, of which I never would think about with Vue and Svelte, because they already took care about it. And performance wise they are on par. btw, I wrote a related post some time ago https://www.brachkow.com/notes/what-i-like-in-vue/ https://www.brachkow.com/notes/what-i-like-in-vue/
• zrn900 5mo ago
  I do. Though I avoid using it as much as possible because it's an overkill for practically everything like any other modern frontend framework. It's a Computer Science thing used where it should not. We really don't need to keep the state of the entire dom. It sounds great in CS, but in the real world, it ends up in bloat. Few websites other than social network sites, financial/trading sites etc ever need to update every corner of the page. The majority of the web can just do with having 1-2 interactive, auto-updating zones on each page. That's why we are going back to where we were 15-20 years ago with things like the 'islands architecture'...
• ul0gic 5mo ago
  [dead]
• AbraKdabra 5mo ago
  JSX is an absolute cancer, I don't trust any developer that thinks JSX is objectively better than SFC.
• RexFactorem 5mo ago
  [dead]