unfortunately HTML didn't make any significant progress as a hypermedia for a decade and a half, but some folks (myself included) are trying to fix that (unpoly, htmx, hotwire, etc.)
an enhanced hypermedia model offers a lot more interactivity often at a fraction of the complexity, and w/ the benefits of the REST-ful architecture (flexibility, etc.)
to draw a desktop app analogy, I guess these things need a back-end as a GUI application that has to deal with all the presentation logic, and thin client that remote desktop to that. While the current SPA model would be RPC with fat clients, your call.
One could argue that it's not that React can't handle increasingly complex situations for you and that's why you spend more time on them, but that frontend as a craft has evolved due to React having solved the easy parts and has raised the bar, and therefore these complex situations belong to the next breeding site wherein the community is arguing about new solutions all the time, at the current time. It's healthy to retrospect how we got to this breeding site, yet there's always a certain doubt or even bias that what brought us here today is not what takes us forward tomorrow. It's like the reverse of Shiny Object Syndrome.
In time, I believe React can still take us forward.
What React does is no longer novel. People have both cloned React and have made other libraries/frameworks that accomplish the same thing differently or even faster in some cases.
Frontend craft has also become too complex in general. We really need to step back and decide whether all this fucking shit around SPA, SSR, route splitting, transpiling, everything-as-a-type, "me too" features between frameworks, overemphasis on trendy designs, package managers that wrap around other package managers, REST or GraphQL or RPC, etc. etc. etc. Much of which serves mostly to create corporate careers for developers more than to actually serve users.
React takes us forward in the sense that most of us don't want to go back to direct DOM manipulation or jQuery, and it's simple enough that it doesn't come with the same baggage as Vue, Angular, Ember, and so on. Even if React itself were to fade, the institution that is React I think will continue on for the foreseeable future.
> Much of which serves mostly to create corporate careers for developers than to actually serve users.
I'm a developer that's done with this, but it brings in VC money so in my experience it serves mostly to create opportunities for CEOs to get some more money on the table via buzzword pitches.
> React takes us forward in the sense that most of us don't want to go back to direct DOM manipulation
There was recently a demo of what a Todo MVC app might look like if written in vanilla JS with today's apis. It looks fairly decent; I could see myself going back to something like that:
It's definitely feasible and even pleasant to write a frontend app in vanilla JS, if it's relatively simple. I hate to be that guy, but... does it scale?
Perhaps it can. I haven't really tried to write a large scale frontend app in vanilla that is similar in complexity to apps I've worked on that have millions of users. Maybe it's feasible, but it would take a lot of dedication to "do things right" by the developers on the team.
Also, reactive templates pretty much kill any desire I would have to by relying on direct DOM calls. With something like React or Svelte alone, there's practically no disadvantage to using them even strictly for rendering besides added file size. With vanilla, it would take more effort to make things efficient because you don't necessarily just want to call render() whenever something changes. It's really nice having a templating system that allows you to change things surgically without doing a lot of extra work rerendering things that shouldn't actually change.
However, I think vanilla JS rendering definitely has a place in terms of writing small, purposeful, modular components. Frameworks should make it straight forward to use vanilla components so that things that would be more succinct in vanilla can be written as such.
The part about Redux and Context seems to be a complete misinterpretation of what Context is meant for. It was never meant to replace Redux, and as far as I know nobody from the React team has ever claimed something like that. State management in React is a topic discussed to death, there are plenty of options if you have specific tastes or requirements but plain old React state works perfectly fine as well (especially when coupled to server-side state libraries like React Query). But Context is not about state management, it does not seem useful to complain that it doesn't do a job well it was never meant to do.
The part about the Inspector component and the rules of hooks I don't understand. I would have put the visibility state outside the Inspector component, and then there is no need for any conditional calling of hooks.
While I agree that the intent of Context isn't state management, but its functionality in practice is nearly identical to state management.
I know and agree this has been discussed to death, so please be patient while I beat this long-dead horse.
In the beta React docs, Context is described as: "Context lets the parent component make some information available to any component in the tree below it—no matter how deep—without passing it explicitly through props." [1]
In the docs prior to that, they go over how to use the useState hook to manage state [2]. In the paragraphs immediatly following, they describe how to drill props to pass that state around to child components and how to lift it up so it is easier to share [3].
So, while Context may not explicitly be about state management, it's positioned as a way to make managing state via prop drilling much easier. It's easy to see how someone new to React would come to the conclusion that Context is about state management. The React beta docs all but say so.
If the React team doesn't want developers to think about Context as state management, they should not implicitly position it as state management.
To me one of the biggest issue is that almost everyone is deeply afraid of prop drilling. Passing props around and having some local state works very well for large parts of many applications. With hooks we don't have deeply nested Higher-Order components anymore, if you pay a bit of attention you can have reasonably shallow component hierarchies and props work very nicely then.
Server-side state is a special case, I find that much easier to handle with something like React Query. But once that is done I don't see much need for any external state management library like Redux, useState/useReducer works pretty well.
And yes, sometimes Context is useful for state that doesn't change much. But those are the cases where the drawbacks don't matter. But that is a special case, not necessary for the vast majority of state.
> To me one of the biggest issue is that almost everyone is deeply afraid of prop drilling.
Prop Drilling is considered an anti-pattern for good reason.
It very quickly turns your project into an absolute mess, making it impossible to determine where props are coming from and where data is actually set.
Keeping that clean is one of the most important things you can do in a frontend codebase imo.
That doesn't make sense, props are easily to follow and they only flow in one direction from parent to children. Excessively deep component structures are a problem, but not only because of the excessive prop drilling they cause.
This conflation of Redux and Context as state management is devilishly persistent. As I see it, Redux is [state management] + [prop passing], and Context is [prop passing]. There is no [state management] "feature" of Context. You still have to use (something like) useState for [state management] with Context. As long as people try to compare them as equivalent feature sets, the confusion will continue.
Yep. The article has some good points overall, but Context was definitely never intended as a replacement for Redux. Redux and Context are different tools that solve different problems, with some small overlap.
Honestly, this is a point of confusion I see folks ask about _every_ day.
Context is a Dependency Injection tool for a single value, used to avoid prop drilling.
Redux is a tool for predictable global state management, with the state stored outside React.
Note that Context itself isn't the "store", or "managing" anything - it's just a conduit for whatever state you are managing, or whatever other value you're passing through it (event emitter, etc).
I ended up writing an extensive article specifically to answer this frequently asked question, including details about what the differences are between Context and Redux, and when to consider using either of them:
Yeah this. We use Context to apply different themes in a multi-tenant app, and we use Redux to manage global state like the header. Both are great for their purpose.
> [React Context] was never meant to replace Redux, and as far as I know nobody from the React team has ever claimed something like that.
I think the conflation came more from the "community" than from the React team itself. Many people were (ab)using Redux for simple cases were Context would have been sufficient and, in the process, paying the price of having a lot of boilerplate related to writing anemic "reducers" whose only purpose was to store things on the global state, and eventually also paying the price of having a ball-of-mud of a global state where no-one could be sure of the dependencies between components, as anyone could be accessing anything on that big ball-of-mud. (Been there; not proud.)
So, when the Context API came along, with a much leaner API (no actions or reducers) and less "global-y" feel than Redux, people who were misusing the latter naturally saw the former as a good replacement
Can definitely agree with his pain point about forms. I've been through most of the libraries, and the one I liked the most was Formik, because it felt like I could actually get something done. react-hook-forms is beautiful when it works, but the documentation is byzanthine - even when I know exactly what I'm looking for (and I've seen the page before), I often can't find it.
this is an unpopular opinion, most people including myself would say the opposite. react-hook-forms seems pretty natural and closer to html form & plain javascript, while Formik is (was?) this bizzare thing that forces jsx and controlled inputs upon us devs.
Yeah, I agree that react-hook-forms feels much more natural and straightforward to use compared to Formik. It's just a shame it's so poorly documented.
What is poorly documented about react-hook-form? I like the documentation a lot, and it's creator is EXTREMELY responsive regarding github issues & discussions and on their discord as well.
Formik hasn’t been updated in years, is riddled with bugs and performance issues, and very likely will never be updated again. Not what I’d want in a JS library.
I've been using it for the last two years. Don't you feel it's quite low-level and also quite problematic to have to keep thinking about caches all the time?
As a developer who’s been working with React since the beta, I can confidently say that the author is speaking the truth. Especially so near the end of the article where they can’t seem to quit React.
For all the annoyances of Hooks, they really are a godsend when it comes to composing state. And refs do indeed suck, but they sucked even more with class based components. I can’t tell you how many times I was able to solve a complex DOM state issue with custom hooks wrapped around refs.
Newer tools like Svelte and Solid do look promising as far as removing boilerplate, but they personally feel a step too far off the path of “it’s just JavaScript.”
Has anyone else here successfully left for greener JS pastures?
That’s the thing though - hooks aren’t JS. They don’t allow for control flow. Hooks are a language that superficially looks like JS. I’m with you on not inventing new languages, and I wish that React didn’t step so far off that path itself…
"Just" is not really fair here, they're a window into global variables. Global state is awful to deal with but a necessity in the real world, so having some sort of constrained global state is something we're always trying to solve in new ways, singletons, monads, etc. Here we have hooks, which is an interesting experiment but something I personally would have played with in some new framework rather than dropping into the most popular and mainstream one.
Depends on what you mean by global state. You don't have access to a single pool of global variables. You only have access to what you put there and what you've been given.
This is so silly. Hooks are literally hooks into a scheduling algorithm you are at the mercy of. That scheduling algorithm is pure JS. Of course you don't have classical control flow in someone else's scheduler.
The key users are referring to when talking about "JS vs magic" is that React is just constructing objects and invoking functions, with known semantics, whereas Solid and Svelte are auto-magic-reactive systems without clear semantics rising from the choice to do even more things in their internal black boxes than React, such as never re-rendering components, dark compiler magic on syntax that doesn't naturally map to a JS tree, and other such things
But hooks need to be named "useX" and have restrictions on where to be called (that a program detects). While they are of js clearly they are not "normal" js functions either.
While I use hooks without problem, I also feel like it is an invented mini-language with a lot of extra quirks. Maybe the problem is js does not map elegantly to some of these functional concepts without a good type system.
Hooks don’t actually need to be named “useX”. That’s the convention, and the React team provides a lint rule that enforces it, but you can name your hooks whatever you want and it’ll work fine.
I’m not what sure what you mean by not “normal” JS functions, though? They’re an API provided by a framework, and — like all APIs — they have specific constraints that govern how they’re used.
Absolutely correct. I stand corrected. There is also a lint rule (the program I was refering to) to check that hooks are not called in some wrong places IIRC. Those lint rules are the default for create react app.
To each their own. Although I use react and hooks, for my taste the hooks api is not very clean. All these are implicit not explicit and without linting they can easily result in runtime errors. But maybe I am spoiled by Elm ;)
> have restrictions on where to be called (that a program detects)
Yes, it is strange that they opted for this implicit approach, but this is the nature of interacting with a scheduling algorithm in real-time; it is with limitations
I agree they are clearly not unrestricted free-use JS, but they aren't a custom DSL hydrated by compile-time craziness, they are hooks into a scheduling algorithm to help you maintain consistent state in a giant tree. I'm not sure how that is ever going to be free. Perhaps a better type system can help but this is fundamentally complex
This is because hooks are just next() calls on an iterator. Is it magic and entirely because the devs thought it was more beautiful than having to pass a key like state = useState("state", 0)? Absolutely. Does it transcend JS, no.
The code in React executing components relies on hooks running in a consistent order each time the component runs, but the existence of a runtime context that has expectations about side effects (and hooks are side effects) doesn't make it “not javascript”.
It only matters that the order not change dynamically between renders. This probably could have been avoided if react required a unique key per hook, but I think for brevity it's a decent trade-off.
For the life of me, I can't understand why they didn't go the route of "add an id to your hook." It would solve one of the two big gripes people have with hooks.
ids would be stuttering (especially for things like useMemo/useState), add a different source of error, and—if the goal was to make hooks compatible with flow control—probably create new categories of bugs that would be harder to catch in a linter or even with runtime checks like the existing “number of hooks cllaed changed” one.
Adding visual noise to enable subtle bugs may not be a win.
Hooks are functions, and they are executed in the order called from within the component, which is itself a function, just like any other functions calls from within another function.
(The mechanism tracking calls to them and deciding whether the function passed to the hook needs to be called requires them to be called in the same order each time the component is executed; if they were called in order of definition rather than normal execution order this would be true by definition; the whole reason for the rule about not using flow control around them is that they are functions executed in normal flow order.)
I’m also a developer and tech lead who’s been working with React since the beta. Agreed with all your points about React. I’m not sure I would say Svelte and Solid are a farther step off the “just JavaScript” path than React given JSX though.
I haven’t tried Solid, but Svelte has already paid considerable dividends for our team. Frontend feature development pace is faster, the code is generally leaner, and the developers love working with it.
> I haven’t tried Solid, but Svelte has already paid considerable dividends for our team. Frontend feature development pace is faster, the code is generally leaner, and the developers love working with it.
Is that just down to Svelte, though? Or is it the greenfield effect? Projects always fly quickly at first, when the code is fresh and unconstrained, and you're building the basics.
My concern would be when things get complicated and you have to debug Svelte's binding magic - and I have very bad memories doing that in Angular and Knockout.
I would argue it's 100% greenfield effect. A rewrite fixes all the things but introduces new problems. I would bet the OP could've achieved the same effect by figuring out what's wrong with their codebase (which honestly is easier for an outsider to do than someone who has worked on it everyday).
And I would caution against converting anything to a non JSX or hyperscript language (like svelte or vue), you don't want to tie your entire view to some HTML-like DSL IMO.
To clarify, this was new development — not the process of rebuilding of an existing app. For that reason, the greenfield development was indeed simpler.
That being said, it’s been one year and making changes to the Svelte application is (in the developers’ opinions) easier than our set of comparably-sized React applications. Of course, all of this is specific to our team members’ skillsets, the application complexity, etc.
I can confirm Svelte is way easier, leaner, and quicker to work with than React. The exception is, of course, the library support, which is a huge drawback and would make me cautious of using it in a business setting for another year or two.
I'm also a TL (which makes me a teaspoon here in Germany, which I like more than the tech lead title). I understand how the development can be faster with Svelte, but ecosystem argument really hits home. You'd get to 80% with Svelte perhaps much faster than React, but that missing library for, say, drag-and-drop makes that last 20% itself plus "hey let's develop our own drag-and-drop library in-house which should be easy and opinionated and maybe it gets open-sourced" (it will be hard, with crazy high budget, as it will try to cover many use-cases you will never have and it still won't be open-sourced because now it's your "core competency" and five months later someone will realize your component has terrible a11y and etc. and one million bug fixes later it is a monster code-base that none wants to touch and maybe rewrite? oh here we go again).
All excellent points. Yes, the package ecosystem has been a pain point.
We’ve turned this into a slight positive by pushing the business to allow us to make open source contributions. The developers seem to enjoy this a lot, and hopefully our work helps others in the space.
Someone needs to invent a way to import React/Vue/Angular packages to Svelte and still use Svelte syntax somehow. Sounds crazy but I wonder if even remotely possible.
> they personally feel a step too far off the path of “it’s just JavaScript.”
That’s more or less exactly what everyone said about JSX when it first arrived. Now people don’t really consider it. I suspect we might end up feeling the same way about Svelte’s language additions if they ever become commonplace.
Personally, I found Vue was the best solution for CRUD-like use cases, where the complexity is in the sheer variety and volume of UIs you need to maintain. Whereas React works better for more complex interactions.
That being said, the Vue2 -> Vue3 migration has felt pretty frustrating. It's felt like, with enough work, I could eventually get Vue to behave similar to React.
> I still think Vue (especially Vue 2) is the greatest of them all. I've worked professionally with Angular, React, and Vue. Each for several years. Vue is easily the winner for me with the syntax that closely matches native HTML and JS/TS and how it encourages clean separation of concerns and clean code. JSX/TSX is absolutely the worst for the latter, it's like the wild west. "But you don't have to write it that way" - yeah ok, but when you work in a large organization it's going to get written that way by your peers; good luck trying to stop it. Angular is just a clusterfuck of pipes and observables that require higher cognitive load to unravel when trying to understand a semi-complex block of code. Contrast with Vue where I can near instantly understand what it's trying to accomplish.
> This shit right here - {#if <condition>} {:else} {/if} - is why Svelte is deterring me. For the love of god, can we stop coming up with weird custom syntax for templating code? This is one area where Angular also pisses me off: *ngIf for example is just as hideous. With Vue: v-if, v-else. You add it as an attribute to native html, it's dead simple. No weird symbols, no braces or other oddball shit I have to look up when I step away from it for a few months and come back. It just makes sense right away.
I tend to agree with this, I prefer the way Svelte make the not HTML/JS/CSS bits really stand out but it's definately just a personal preference. I don't really care about the "it's not JS" argument, people are happy to use typescript without that compaint so it feels rather arbitrary.
> Has anyone else here successfully left for greener JS pastures?
I've simply stopped doing any frontend development contract work *. Until the whole JavaScript world pulls its head out of its bottom, I'll leave that niche to other people.
* I'll do JS and React if I really have to, but I'm actively avoiding any client-side focused projects.
It's a wide open web with millions of developers, and 25 years of language and ecosystem development, so there will always be 27 1/2 ways to solve a problem. Client side dev is hard. Especially on the web. It's understandable that anyone would avoid it for easier work.
I don’t believe in quitting cold turkey and I don’t think there’s anything available to fully replace all aspects of React. We’re instead gradually transitioning our internal ecosystem to use less React-specific stuff, positioning us to migrate (or not) in the next few years.
- Move from CSS-in-JS to vanilla CSS
- Avoid React-specific libraries, both developing them internally or when selecting third-party deps
- Keep business logic out of React components whenever possible
Yes and I'm surprised no one has mentioned Lit or bare metal web components in this convo. I'm starting a large TS project at the AAA game studio where I work (my day job, not DTA) and it wasn't hard to choose to avoid React or Vue or Angular.
Lit is the anti-framework because it isn't a framework. Once you remove all the cruft, you can spend a lot more time writing the code that you want to write and, doing so in the way that you want to do it. Everything discussed in this article is solved by bare metal web components.
Because lit is too bare metal to qualify as a js framework. Does it have good solutions for router or state management? Last time i checked: No.
That is why it is not discussed that much. If you need to write components, then lit may work for you, but whoever wants to ise those components would prefer a js framework.
Also, lit is from Google. which makes it worse as Angular is from Google as well
Lit is just syntactic sugar for bare metal stuff that is W3C standards based. There isn't any vendor lock-in and won't be "upgrading" your Lit because they told you to.
You are right on components for other people -- but if all the components are for you or your company, ones you handcraft w/ Lit will be lighter weight and easier to write and fix.
We have had success in migrating away from React, and in fact away from client-side code altogether by building more and more of the UI of our Elixir/Phoenix backed application in Phoenix LiveView. There are still some parts of system that really need to be client-side code powered (a WYSIWYG HTML editor, for example) but now our default choice for new UI is LiveView.
Been using various web component frameworks in enterprise level projects and have been very happy with them (Polymer, Lit, other custom frameworks as well). The nice thing is that since they are standards based you know that they will be around for the long haul and will have a more measured evolution.
I just use vanilla JS on the front-end just like I do with Node.
I have never understood why people find state management challenging. I suppose its because they are stuck in a framework or MVC mindset where everything is a separate component and each must have separate state models that must be referenced frequently and independently. I just put all my state data in one object, save it on each user interaction, and use it only on page refresh. I have an entire OS GUI working like this and the state management part is only a few dozen lines of code.
Frameworks are like being locked in an insane asylum. You may not be crazy, but everybody else is and you have to follow all these extra rules you would never follow with freedom in the real world. But, the insane asylum provides you meals and bedding and many people can't be bothered to figure that stuff out without necessary hand holding.
I wish I could understand the appeal of react and other frameworks but everytime I interact with them I find them so terrible opaque and frustrating. I've built plenty of things with various frameworks including react[1], maintained, been in team-based development doing it, have github projects that use them with thousands of stars but I think they are brain-damaged terrible ways of doing things that shouldn't exist.
I've given it a fair shake and I wish I could change this opinion. I'm trying not to rant so I'll stop here.
I do a cathartic exercise every time this stuff gets to me at a themed twitter account. It's pure vitriol: https://twitter.com/sisnode
[1] oftentimes I see the anti-react argument as "react sucks which is why I use Y framework". I'm saying they are all(?) a toxic trend that leads to terrible products; more complicated, harder to maintain, aggressively encouraging a glossary of programming antipatterns passing it off as elegance.
The more you deviate from one of the set of common conventions, often enforced by frameworks, the more you have to build on your own.
The larger your project gets, and the more developers who need to understand your code, and the more developers you need to hire and get onboarded quickly, the more that those extra rules start to make sense.
And once you've learned and internalized the patterns necessary to build larger systems, it becomes force of habit to just use it wherever, even if it's nominally easier without them. For most developers, a go-to pattern will be faster than working from first principles on every project.
> I suppose its because they are stuck in a framework or MVC mindset where everything is a separate component and each must have separate state models that must be referenced frequently and independently. I just put all my...
Then you exactly describe MVC...
> state data in one object,
This is your model.
> save it on each user interaction,
This is your controller.
> and use it only on page refresh.
This is your view.
MVC is a relatively simple concept, and it works well.
I introduced Vue to a plain JS project once and reduced the amount of front end code by almost half, and vastly simplified the state management.
We must work on very different kinds of projects. I really can't imagine plain JS being a viable or appealing solution compared to Vue, which gives me very little grief at all.
While I don't doubt your specific experience, I'm wary about drawing firm conclusions from a single project. Vanilla JS projects can vary wildly in how verbose and complicated they are. I would bet that there are plenty of examples of both types: those that would be much more concise with a framework and those that wouldn't.
Doesn't that mean you can never reflect state updates in the DOM without refreshing the whole page?
> I have never understood why people find state management challenging
Automatically determining what DOM objects need to be updated in response to a change in state and updating them without a page refresh adds a lot of complexity, if you completely ignore that requirement then state management would be simple like you said.
Vue has been my favorite since Vue 2. It hits the right balance for me between the opinionated Angular and "you figure it out" React. It does what I want a JS framework to do: binds values and renders views with minimal setup (computed properties solve so many common problems).
Also, it has amazing ESLint rules that really help keep all your code aligned and following best practices.
React is great for managing the shadow dom, but it still sucks for state management. I am really happy with React + XState as my core stack. Scalable, type-safe, universal.
I've been using React for maybe 6 years now and Javascript for at least 10 years before that. I've started using Svelte in the last 6-12 months in professional capacity having messed around with it ofr 12 months of side projects before that, to me it feels much closer to writing HTML, CSS and JS than React ever did. Animations, transitions and other things that can be really awkward in React, requiring hooks and all sorts of framework specific constructs just work as if writing in plain HTML/CSS/JS. The template type bits feel nicely and explicitly separate unlike JSX's oddities wrt things like "className", I prefer it. Particularly I find a typical svelte component significantly more legible.
I've went back to server rendered templates/html, and I'm using Unpoly (1) for adding interaction and partial updates where necessary. I also have a couple Lit (2) components for a part of the app that should work offline.
I think my sentiment is echoed in some sibling comments as well, but I have been having a good time with vanilla JS lately.
React and friends really do make certain things easier and "nicer". But when you sit down and think about it, those things aren't that bad with vanilla JS. It really makes me wonder what value React et al is adding for the cost in KB and mental overhead.
Maybe I’m a React apologist, but this list of complaints seems mostly self-inflicted.
> Form libraries are portly maintained or documented
The two-way data binding in Svelte saves ~4 lines of reusable hook function but doesn’t come close to covering defaults, validation, errors, dependent fields etc - all of that is essential complexity.
Write your own form field hook. The state model for a form is simple - what is a 3rd party library bringing to the table in terms of state management? I have more pain explaining what I want to a 3rd party library than I do writing a bit of code myself to do the same thing. I reach for open-source input components from a vendor for things like credit cards, but manage the state myself.
> useContext and useEffect have annoying dependency tracking; I prefer Solid’s mutable state and automatic dependency tracking.
React’s built-in hooks are positioned as building blocks with clear-cut contracts. Why dump Redux for bare useContext if you prefer Redux’s selectors? Just use Redux. If you like the Solid style of automatic dependency tracking and mutable state, just use Mobx - it’s a mature library for that style that’s been around for 7+ years, and is used in production by products like Linear and Cron.
Overall I agree that function components in React are difficult to get right for developers and a bit too verbose. There’s an onboarding tradeoff to every abstraction you layer over the framework’s APIs, but there’s large advantages too. Do so judiciously to find the sweet spot for your team & scale.
That’s from 2020 and I’m pretty sure that’s using class components, considering the latest implementations has a separate (using hooks) implementation.
Right? If anyone likes 2 way binding they should have tried Polymer. 2 way binding is disgustingly complex for large projects and that's why everyone eventually drops it.
Useless rerenders are really hard to avoid in the latest react, mostly because they changed the rerendering logic of useTransition, breaking some of the state abstractions built on top of it. Had to downgrade and started to think about using class-based components again. Hooks are very beautiful but too weird, weak and leaky as an abstraction, unfortunately
1. yes, un/controlled forms are messed up and need work
2. yes, contexts should replace Redux and Redux should go away. but in practice having a few contexts is pretty manageable. Currently we use Redux for all the dynamic state and contexts for everything else and it works pretty well. It is quite easy, also, to write your only little `useSelector()` wrapper around a non-mutating context value (ie: the context has a callback on changes, you listen and filter updates, then update a `useState` to trigger rerender)... but but maybe this a bit too abstract to actually want to do.
3. yes, forwardRef is silly.
4. yes, useEffect is kinda broken. My main issue which wasn't discussed much here is that the difference between `useEffect(..., [])` and `useEffect(...)` is insane. The latter should not exist, or have a different name entirely.
Otherwise, I really don't mind tracking deps _that much_, although I hate that it's hard to have an effect that updates 'on some local variable changes but not others', so in practice I pretty much ignore the lint warnings all the time.
It all feels like "there's a DSL waiting to be written for this stuff, similar to how JSX makes createElement() more ergonomic, but it doesn't exist yet".
That said, Solid doesn't seem like the answer. Solid's even worse: now you're using JSX for if/else statements, instead of the actual DSL you want that doesn't exist yet. Good luck running a debugger on that. (Although actually, if the Solid AST ends up in the Devtools view, that's pretty good. But still: this needs a fully-featured DSL).
5. +1, yeah, the continuing addition of weird hooks feels like a mistake that will eventually be regretted.
6. The right way to do your Inspector example is to have a parent component that decides whether it's rendered, and a separate child which does all the event listeners. It is a bit weird to me that React doesn't allow this to be done in one place. The closest thing is defining another component inline in the first one and then immediately rendering it. But for readability it's best to just have two separate components.
7. +1 to old docs getting in the way. I'd love to see a React 2 with a new name that deletes all the class component stuff entirely so that all of the docs about it are up-to-date. I've been toying with trying to work on this myself.
8. Yeah, fuck FB
9. Yeah, I'm not going to any of the other frameworks either. React is great, it's just ... not... great enough. I am in the middle of writing a series of blog posts about exactly this and I haven't finished yet but anyway here's the first one that I have written about why I like it so much? https://alexkritchevsky.com/2022/09/17/react.html
Nice blog post, the part about jQuery UI is spot on. There is lots of talk here about how a bit of jQuery is all sites need, but it always turns into a giant pile of complexity when writing all of the transitions rather than just the state that you want.
When you want to have "early return" in a component, it's possible to just split the component into two to introduce an "inner" component that contains whatever comes after the early return point in the original component.
Any local variables from before the early return then need to be passed as props to the new inner component.
However, naming this inner component is always an issue for me. Typically I just name them Inspector2, Inspector3, etc. until I have an implementation that works. Then I can start thinking about how to refactor the implementation into something that I can give sensible names.
It's really a code transformation similar to async/await where you derive a state machine from a block of code by identifying transition points. In async/await you have transitions at the await points; in components you have transitions at the early return points. In async/await, no one is forcing you to name the individual states or even write them out explicitly - the compiler takes care of it. Then why do I have to write out the state machine explicitly and name the states explicitly for function components with early return? I would love for React to have some facility like "Consider the rest of this component as a new sub-component; as if this component now returns a single Element pointing to whatever is in the rest of this component". But it's probably a Hard Problem™.
This is exactly the use case for HOCs and why I continue to be old man yells at cloud about how the "hooks replace(d) HOCs" zeitgeist is missing a key benefit.
Wrapping components lets you have layers that don't have to care about what's going on inside. HOCs just let you write those layers in a way that can be composed. In your example, `isVisible` could be its own HOC, and then the inner component can have whatever name it needs.
The number of people who have sent me this exact meme for daring to offer an alternative is quite illuminating of why it's so hard to make progress. Not picking on you, but dogmatic thinking is why OPs article even exists.
Don't substitute memes for thinking. Evaluate what I've built on its actual merits.
Respectfully, I don't have the time or interest to, and to be quite honest while I am qualified to implement just about anything you want in vanilla JS, jQuery, [old versions of] Angular, React, or Vue2, I'm very likely not qualified to judge a brand new one on its merits other than just a superficial comparison to the ones I've used before.
Don't tell me what to do. You acted like a clown and got busted. If you're going to open your mouth, be able to back it up—otherwise sit down and be quiet.
I took a very brief look at your project. I saw reams of documentation, which is good, but not a single FAQ or a comparison table answering perhaps one of the most important questions to somebody who's already familiar with existing frameworks such as react, angular, and vue, which are:
What distinguishes your framework?
Who should use it?
What does it do? And more importantly, what doesn't it do?
Simplicity and stability, primarily, and second: scope.
The current crop of frameworks seeks to overcomplicate APIs and are indecisive about how things should be done (as evidenced by the introduction of patterns that are "the way" one day and then a few months later are "deprecated"). This leads to a lot of confusion at the community level which makes it hard to build software that can endure overtime (I came to this conclusion through teaching developers and realizing how much time was wasted chasing the proverbial rabbit of indecision).
Even worse, these frameworks introduce their own languages/syntax which are foreign to what a beginner would learn (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). This not only creates confusion and slows down the learning process, but it also creates the long-term nightmare of developers not understanding the fundamentals of the tools they use to build. Eventually, you hit a drop-off point where people think that, for example, JSX is HTML and in a pinch where they can't use React, are ineffective or incapable of completing the task properly.
By contrast, Joystick is designed to be stable, long-term, from the beginning (i.e., no random "hey, we're deprecating all this stuff you depend on for this more confusing API that's less descriptive"). It's also based on the core technologies of the web: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I don't introduce any hacks or sytnax tricks to render the component. It's plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This means that the transition from learning the basics of the web to shipping apps is far smoother (and an individual developer is less likely to make mistakes/get confused as everything looks consistent with where they started).
I also intentionally designed the component API to be fixed long-term. So, a component you write in Joystick today will look the same 10 years from now. My focus will be behind the scenes, improving performance and security. This matters less to developers and more to businesses (my target) as a lot of time and money is wasted on developers who are more focused on tinkering with technology (and making messes) than actually building the thing they're supposed to build.
For scope: Joystick is a full-stack framework, not front-end only. The UI part (@joystick.js/ui) is designed to snap in to the back-end/server part (@joystick.js/node). The advantage is that you're not wasting time trying to stitch together disparate parts that may or may not work together (or even worse, may or may not be supported long-term).
> Who should use it?
SMBs, startups, and freelancers/contractors. For SMBs/startups, it's a solid framework for shipping custom software for your business (or a consumer/b2b SaaS) that you can rely on long-term. So, build it today and maintenance is limited to some patch upgrades and new features/improving existing features. Never a surprise refactor being plopped on the roadmap, distracting you and your team from delivering value to customers.
For freelancers/contractors, remove the overwhelm of juggling a bunch of disparate codebases across clients that each have their own shifting requirements (i.e., standardize what you ship, full-stack). This allows you to take on more work, but also, make your long-term support more predictable as the framework you're building on isn't going to rug pull you down the road. This allows you to build a better business with happier clients.
> What does it do? And more importantly, what doesn't it do?
It allows you to define routes on the server which when matched, render some HTML, CSS, and JavaS...
I spent about 2 years at my last job building a greenfield react app mostly by myself (around 10k sloc). I enjoyed it for the most part. But I did run into all the issues raised here, they are valid. I think the worst issue with React is the dependency arrays that get sprinkled around everywhere - in my opinion the framework is unusable without a 3rd party linting tool that points out when your dependency array is missing something. If you accidentally add the wrong value in there, hello infinite render loop!
One of the biggest level ups I had was extracting complex hooks into their own .js files instead of stuffing next to component code. This helps a lot with readability/reusability.
Overall I liked what I came up with, but it felt like a lot of inventing stuff on my own, which I'm not sure if the next developer who comes along will appreciate.
I think a lot of the problems the author highlighted become more apparent as the number of devs in the codebase goes up.
If one member doesn't understand all of the nuances of useEffect or paint useCallback, they can write a component or custom hook that another team uses and gets subtle bugs from.
For example, I need to look inside of a hook to see whether the callback it provided was wrapped in useCallback. That means I can't truly rely on the abstraction since I need to learn it's internals.
Pretty much this. I've owned entire applications and it's really fun when you're working alone. But adding a new developer that does not grok hooks (mostly because they are more use to imperative patterns than functional ones), and you will have bugs to deal with almost every single day. In a project, I was using Firebase as the backend and hooks allowed me to nicely abstract it away and use a language closer to business domain (like `useEntity(entityId)` and `useCreateEntity(entityData)`). Everything was more modular from changing the backend layer to breaking up bigger components.
What's funny to me about this is that React people expressed so much hatred for Angular 1 for its "digest loop" and the difficulty of debugging infinite digest loops. And here we are, difficult to debug infinite digest loops in React that don't even give you the courtesy of raising an error after too many iterations.
I prefer Angular. I never could accept writing css/html in my javascript. To be fair, my background is from XAML, so declaring the state separately and simply binding to it in my html template felt natural. The whole functional approach in React is overkill imo. It's okay if the state mutates in 90% of scenarios. Where there is really benefit from immutable states, I can enforce that on my own.
Yes yes yes! I´ve done some React at my job and also done some Angular/Ionic before. What I never understood of React is why did the creators decided to throw DECADES of Software Engineering development and comingle presentation layer with logic... To separate Views from Logics was an agreed good practice in Software Engineering since I was in undergard school 20 years ago.
I disagree that React is doing anything controversial actually. Angular has logic in it's views, what do you think the handlebars syntax is? The only difference is that they added new syntax to JS instead of adding new syntax to HTML.
And how much logic you put into a component is up to you. Your components can be almost entirely view logic, with any other data fetching or computation offloaded to other regular js files.
Because you will inevitably need to use control flow, conditional rendering, and computed values in your components. And creating proprietary HTML syntax (ie ngIf) to cross reference variables defined in the JS anyways. So why not use JS and gain access to powerful array manipulation, ternary operators, map/reduce/filter functionality, etc instead of leaning on an inferior template syntax?
Mostly because functional components are understood to be the direction the framework is headed, with class components still supported for backwards compatibility reasons only.
They'll almost certainly never go away without a major version bump because it would break way, way too many sites, but at some abstract level people feel class components will have a shorter shelf-life than functional. And certainly, any given third-party integration to React in the future is allowed to just say "We only support functional components" (with the corresponding hit to popularity, of course).
Thanks for commenting about the community sentiment.
Interesting that you didn't comment at all about my take on functional components not being the best tool for every job in React. Curious – do you have an opinion?
If I understand correctly, the team is pretty clear that if they had written React from scratch today, they would have gone with functional components and not class components.
The major issue is life cycle. When is a class component instance created or destroyed? The answer is "whenever the framework feels like it," and that's a really ugly model for instance life cycle. Additionally and most importantly, it means that member variables on a React class component instance don't work the way that members are expected to work; you just can't rely on them having any particular value because the framework can create or destroy an instance when it feels like it for performance reasons. What good is a class and instance abstraction if when you try to use member variables (one of the key features of object-oriented programming) you're highly likely to just break the model in hard-to-debug ways?
Because the framework isn't using class component instances like instances are supposed to be used, the React team is tossing that model to the curb.
It's less code. And if you add hooks (for the reasons specified in the docs), you can have a smaller and more manageable codebase. But hooks differs so greatly from the easier to grasp lifecycle methods and state as component object's property that it's easy to have bugs if you do not grok it.
As someone who built a product that is a form builder that uses React, https://keenforms.com, the best thing I can say is this;
Most of these libraries are fine for simple to medium complexity forms. However once you cross a certain level of complexity these libraries become impediments rather than tools. I probably could have used a redux implementation but build my own state management API with a mixture of object oriented as well as functional programming. The values of the inputs persist so you want objects, but hiding/validating/calculating need to be reset for each change so I used a functional approach for these other features.
React is not perfect and its easy to paint yourself into a corner. However as someone who used to write js for IE6 and has forgotten more js libraries that you can imagine (Dojo, ExtJS, Backbone, Ember, etc) I can tell you right off the bat its the best tool for the job. Not perfect, just like Javascript. Just know and accept its limitations and you should be able to get React to do what you want.
I fail to see the point in SPA apps for the majority of web apps. At my work we have an ancient Dojo frontend and a newer react one being build. Its a few list views that the user can filter and a few forms with validation. It's a ridiculous amount of complexity to avoid loading a page. I could do almost everything for half the effort with server side HTML from Django and a little bit of JQuery.
I ask at my work why we are doing this and no one seems able to give me a decent answer but we carry on down this path regardless.
You should try again and reconsider if your team truly doesn't have an answer.
Most everyone using React should be using Nextjs or similar level of frameworks. Server rendering comes out of the box. On the other hand, it really isn't too complex anymore. With Next, Sveltekit, Remix, Nuxt, and friends, you get simple, hardened tooling out of the box. And you've decoupled frontend from api which many teams find very helpful to split responsibilities and allow certain features to move at different paces.
> Does anyone do server side rendering these days?
Yes, in React, with Next.js.
I'm going to have to dynamically create html and attach event handlers based on data either way. Much rather do it all in Typescript than remember Django templates DSL and still do javascript, for the result of worse UI's, poor 3p library support, and awful state management between frontend and backend.
Django temples are pretty simple. They are basically HTML with a a few constructs that you can put variables or loops in. Way simpler than React and Typescript.
I work on regular ol' websites, that have some pages containing some moderate interactivity – so a few years ago the project adopted React to handle the frontend. I've found the experience mostly OK, but I sometimes get the urge to simplify things by leaning more on server-rendering / maybe using the URL to capture state...
and then realize I can't, and that this is Just The Way It Is Now. Because now all our devs expect to use React (or more accurately, its vast ecosystem of 3rd party functions of varying quality) to accomplish anything, and we forgot to screen for hires who can write their own JS+HTML or who understand how the response/request process works in a web application. (oops!)
"React hires are easy to hire for" so that often drives decisions, but I am skeptical my project ever needed React (or any hyper-optimized-for-SPAs-feature).
It just makes adding simple stuff so slow. Instead of a query, and and HTML template, you have a query built on top a shambles of a system that outputs JSON, passes it to another monstrosity that is our Dojo frontend. I have tried to create some static pages, but everything is so baked in to the mess we have, getting around the login is a major obstacle.
thinking of forms as a model that can be rendered is really valuable IMO. most UXes would be 10x easier to write if we had better standardization around the 'schema to UX' step
'form first UX' would also reduce the work of building cross-platform apps
guessing django is ramping up on its AJAX, but I think a real forms standard would need to understand AJAX -- users aren't going to remember to scroll down to a 'save' button. realtime validation also an AJAX issue, typeahead as well.
Yes, we are trying to move over to FastAPI, which looks reasonable, but I struggle with the fact that there is no one source of truth for models.
Is there anywhere good to find out what I have been missing out on having not kept up to date with Djano for the last few years? I really miss using it and am looking for a job using it again.
I'm on fastapi with my current project -- I love the powerful type support for interfaces.
I'm using tortoise as my ORM; it feels like sqlmodels is worth exploring as an alternative -- sqlmodels is designed to integrate well with pydantic (so you DRY in messages) and with sqlalchemy (so you get their migration support).
I'm not sure if there's a fastapi / pydantic tool for generating form UX, but it might be doable to write one if not. (though styling could be tricky).
I notice myself still spending a lot of time writing basic CRUD routes. I don't know if this is a tools issue or just unavoidable.
I'm open to a tool like postgraphile to automate API on top of a DB schema, but I'm worried about the loss of control over messages, RBAC, and query design. I wish there were a python tool for mostly-declarative API route stubs -- would be simple to customize, and the purely-declarative routes could be shipped off to a postgraphile-like tool in the future.
I wish fastapi had better auth built in, but then again I wish this about django too -- I feel like I'm endlessly shopping for a third-party user auth server and haven't found it yet. Auth + admin were a huge investment at the beginning of my project, and in retrospect feels wasted.
I must be the only person in the world who likes class components in React.
Sure, it's often overkill and a functional component does the same thing with less code. Use a functional component in these cases. But if you're doing something more complicated then stop treating class components like the fucking devil. They have their place.
Coming from Ruby and Python, I also prefer class components to hooks. I had to deal with hooks enough in Drupal/PHP which is in the process of deprecating them in favor of Symfony classes.
Drupal hooks are a functional approach to design compared to the OOP approach of Symfony components. As in you use functions to modify/extend existing code instead of inheritance. That's the context of the discussion, not whether they are otherwise similar to React hooks. Anyway, I just tend to think more in terms of making things with classes/objects than with functions.
No, you're not the only one. Apart from useState, which is elegant, I hate others with passion. How can a replacement for lifecycle methods be called useEffect? Seriously?
> How can a replacement for lifecycle methods be called useEffect? Seriously?
Yes, seriously. Have you used it for more complex components? You can split your effects across multiple useEffects, and have a guarantee that they run completely independently of each other (especially since you know what their dependencies are). Compare that to lifecycle methods: you only have one per component. All your effects concerned with setup have to be piled into the same function, and their associated teardowns have to be elsewhere in another method. How do you audit a behavior's logic? How do you reuse that behavior in another component? It's not easy, and you can cause weird bugs depending on the order in which you run them.
Compare that to useEffect. Setup and teardown in the same function, which allows it to focus on just one behavior. And if you need to, it can be trivially pulled out into its own hook and reused across all your components.
Fair enough. Though, the first question is - why does the component do so many things? Do they all need to be in a single component or can you break them apart?
For the cases when this is not possible, I agree, useEffect works better than classes lifecycle methods. But do you really want a system which caters to a small percent of use-cases at the expense of readability in others? And the improvement, to my eyes, is not that big anyway.
The hooks are my main gripe with React, but as the OP, I don't see a better alternative either - at least not one that would be worth a rewrite.
It's not a matter of doing too many things. Lifecycle methods exist to be used, and the moment you have any behavior that requires multiple lifecycle hooks, you will run into these issues. So I'd say it's not a small-percentage of use-cases at all, and you'll often see the benefits of hooks immediately.
Yeah, it's not great, but that's because it's extremely general purpose. Its name refers to function side-effects. Since you're writing your components functionally, you need to explicitly declare any effects of your function to be run appropriately. Hence: `useEffect`. The names are super generalized because hooks don't necessarily need to render anything; they're just hooks into the React scheduler, so they can even be used to manage connection state if you want.
I find hooks make it easier to break apart components. With a class component, there are tons of hidden dependencies on those huge components. Maintenance programmers add them relentlessly. When it comes time to refactor, it's often easiest to just translate to hooks and then start breaking things apart. Why? hooks are small and self contained by nature, and they compose nicely, so you can start with a ball of hair and use regular refactoring tools (extract to function, move to file) to decompose them.
That didn't require the meta language and rules of hooks though, they could have added this.addEffect(callback, deps) or something to class components. To preserve back compat they could have added a new base class you inherit from to get access to new APIs.
Most of hooks could have been done incrementally on top of classes.
Imagine trying to debug a component that both has lifecycle methods and reactive hooks? That would be a total nightmare, especially when the same state is being updated in both places (because that would have to be allowed). Going all-in on hooks means that there are two distinct, independent ways of writing components, and you never have to deal with interactions between the two.
I also don't think this would be possible. Hooks are based on closures and injected state, which you can't do in a class since separate methods won't share the closure.
Only if you're constrained by the existing API of hooks. Preact signals is a good example of how class components could have been improved with reactivity:
useEffect is poorly designed for sure. It's the single most common source of react bugs I've seen and most developers have to refresh themselves on it if they don't use it for more than a few months because it is totally unintuitive.
A lot of third party hooks are really good though, being able to hook a dependency rather than create higher order components saves a lot of time and is conceptually much easier.
How so? There is nothing that a class-based component can do that a hook-based component can't (EDIT: Except for error boundaries). I'd go as far as to say class-based components are strictly inferior because they force you split your behavior logic across lifecycle methods and are not easily composable. I've been able to support much more complex behavior easily with hooks (e.g., connection management), that would have been a nightmare with class-based components.
Oh yeah, that's the worst. Since logic related to a behavior must be split up across multiple methods, it's really hard to tell if you've actually implemented it correctly. With effects, the setup and teardown is in the same function and can be moved around as a unit.
I don't know that I agree with that. I recently had to fix a few bugs because some devs forgot, or simply didn't know, that lifecycles still exist.
We have reached a period of time where junior devs exist that did not cut their teeth on class components and have no idea of what the lifecycles are. They don't know how rendering works so they either throw up useless memoization everywhere or they don't bother to think of it.
The complexity of class components did not vanish. It was only swept under the rug. Take useEffect. It's overloaded to hell and back. It does too much and people continue to struggle with it. Another one, useRef. It's not really for refs, per se. You will end up using it for data other than refs because function instance variables aren't a thing. No one knows when to use useLayoutEffect or useCallback.
The fact of the matter is that it's not class components vs. hooks. It's that React's API sucks. It's always sucked. And it continues to suck.
> I recently had to fix a few bugs because some devs forgot, or simply didn't know, that lifecycles still exist.
And then it just stays fixed. You don't have to split up the logic across different lifecycle methods and remember to keep them in sync. They're consolidated into functions that can be trivially pulled out into their own hooks and reused.
React is definitely a more low-level framework that requires you to have some familiarity with how the scheduler works, and could benefit from a couple more built-in hooks. But the benefits are undeniable, they make writing and refactoring complex applications an absolute breeze. The fact that you can factor out some state-related behavior into a hook and trivially reuse it is incredible.
For example, take state. With hooks, you use useState. A very common pattern is to need to persist it in the URL to enable deep linking. You can literally just replace your useState call with useQueryParam from the use-query-params library [1] and have your component function identically. You just can't do that with class-based components.
> I'd go as far as to say class-based components are strictly inferior because they force you split your behavior logic across lifecycle methods and are not easily composable.
That's not strictly true. You can implement "hooks" on top of a class based components. It's essentially the strategy pattern.
I'm definitely a novice when it comes to React, but I've shipped a beta version of an internal took using it. I never understood the emphasis on functional components. Everything I did using them was made more complicated and less obvious, especially for colleagues who are not familiar with React or JS in general.
React is built on components which are objects (both in a programming and GUI sense). Using OOP to describe them just makes so much more sense to me.
Functional components tend to be easier to compose. If your class component has very specific functionality that you won't need in other components it's fine but if you want functionality that will be shared across multiple components wrapping up that code into it's own hook is easier to share across components then trying to use wrappers, extending classes and HOCs.
Can you give me an example? I didn't have that experience. I extended classes for everything and it was super easy. But as I said, I was probably using react in a fairly basic way.
For example you have a button that you want to add a hover effect to. So it's got "onMouseEnter" and "onMouseLeave" handlers that sets a "hovered" state variable to true/false.
If you have that functionality in a class component, and want to share it with a new link component, then the React Class way is to create a "withHover" HOC and wrap your link component in it. withHover(LinkComponent) which will have the necessary variables and pass them as props to your LinkComponent which is "okay".
But what if you have like 5 of these little hooks? Your LinkComponent now needs to be wrapped in each (or them all wrapped into a single HOC) and has to accept the props for all of them. Or, if you're extending classes as you describe you now have class LinkComponent extends HoverClass, ClickClass, DataClass etc...
With functional components you have something like a "useHover" hook. It passes back the hover state and the "onMouseEnter" and "onMouseLeave" callbacks necessary for your link within the functional component itself. It doesn't have to expose props to it's HOC, so it's now self contained.
It seems the philosophy of react is to have a lot of "littler" discreet pieces of code be they components or hooks and not have to have a ton of dependencies between them. You tend to get better tests this way as well as it should make it easier for other devs as they don't have to know the whole system and can work on a more discreet bit.
I, personally, use function components pretty much exclusively these days. If the function gets too big with hooks I tend to just create a single hook from them, not because it's going to be shared but just to keep my code more manageable, the hooks create props and the components consume them.
To each their own. I don't seem to be frustrated by the problems many in this thread and the article share.
Could you say more about this? I'm not a React user, but to me one of the OO fundamentals is "object = behavior + state". What you're saying sounds so obviously correct to me that I guess there's something pretty weird going on in React-land?
React added "hooks" which are basically methods and properties implemented as FIFO queues instead of lookup tables, with terrible syntax that requires you to declare them inside their constructor (the "functional" component's... well, function).
No, I'm not kidding.
Unless something's fundamentally changed about the code since release, they even end up attached to an object representing the UI component, by the time the heart of React's runtime code considers them. It's some real Rube-Goldberg shit. I read the code because I read the announcement docs and was like "wait, it looks like they... but no, surely they didn't" but yeah, turns out, they did.
What's worse, they have interesting "rules" that one really needs to use a linter so their IDE/Text editor gives them friendly reminders. One cannot conditionally call useEffect. One needs to add all dependencies to useEffect's dependency array - BUT that has potential to cause infinite re-renders (especially when using a getter/setter pattern with useState). They encourage DEFINING functions inside of other functions. Years of CS education and practice go right out the window because some popular JS person on Twitter says, "it's fine".
When pressed about it, be ready to be hit with, "You don't understand hooks".
I agree with the others. I've started using hooks since they were introduced and I've only hit the re-render issue only a few times, which I promptly fixed as they were caused by carelessness. My strategy is to not use a single useEffect, but multiple ones for each (which reduce greatly the dependencies). Also, avoiding dependency circles between useState and useEffect.
I've used class components and I think hooks are much better than the monstrosity that the lifecycle methods would usually become.
Also defining functions inside other functions is very much the staple of functional programming.
In React terms, "functional" almost always implies the opposite of purely functional. It just means that the component is declared by a function instead of a class. First time you call it, the function can assign state that it may reference in future calls, not unlike the methods of a class. How they actually go about this is however almost entirely weird.
Classes in JS are just functions anyway, and functions can have state. Saving the state of a function is a different thing, but of course JS allows that, too. Why is it weird?
Class instances are objects and it's the objects that have state. Functions can only abuse themselves as objects to store state.
function johnson() { johnson.state = {}; }
This is however shared state and the state will be reset whenever the function is called a second time. So what you normally do with a function is to pass the state via arguments and now the same function can work with different states. React could totally do this via props or as a second argument.
function Johnson(props, state) {}
Instead they changed the laws of functions so that a function can act different the first time it is called and also be called the first time multiple times if and when the function calls a functions that looks like JavaScript but follow different rules [1].
Yes, there is something very weird indeed. Functional components are called every time they're rendered (that's not weird). But they have to maintain state between calls; they can't start over again fresh for each call/render (still not weird). So how do they do this? `const [state, setState] = useState(initialValue)`. You might look at that and think, I see useState being called, so it must be called on each render, so state is still not being preserved between calls.
But here's the weirdness. useState knows whether it's already been called for a given component; this is how it tracks state. The first call returns the state (the initial value) and a setter. Subsequent calls -- occurring after the first render -- do not return these objects anew, but instead reach into a per-functional-component store and return the values that already exist there. Calling the setter doesn't set the state in the body; rather, it updates the value in the store, then triggers a re-render.
If you're wondering just how react knows how to match up calls to useState between renders, it doesn't really. It simply matches them up based on the order they're called in. For that reason, you have to always call exactly the same useState calls on each render -- no putting some in an if statement or a variable length for loop, otherwise they'll be out of sync.
There are a bunch of other "hooks" for use in functional components, but they all work basically the same way: place some data in the functional component's store, then set up re-render (which, again, just means calling the component's function again) to occur when certain data changes.
It is bonkers. My number of "accidental" re renders on react are greater than before hooks.
Before at least I knew what was called on boostrap moments. Now everything is run as a side effect when any dependency change. My needs on checking if a prop or a dependency has changed hasn't evolved at all. I just have the core of my side effects on useEffect.
It's sort of what happens when OOP is demonized for years and FP is lionized. They've created what are effectively classes but with implicitly auto-generated private property names and a lot of weird edge cases where things can go pear shaped. But hey, it's functional and 'new' so it's good, right?
In fairness, the JS world has never had well engineered OOP GUI toolkits like you find in the desktop space. If you've never used JavaFX then ReactJS probably seems pretty magical. If you have, then, well ...
I know, but you didn't actually say you think React is awesome when not using JS. Given how JS specific React is, that's not a very intuitive outcome.
The comment was in response to "that's bonkers". And that has been my reaction on learning stuff like React and derived frameworks. A lot of it looks like functions for the sake of it, when objects already solve those problems but became unfashionable.
It sounds bonkers, but one of the reasons I pushed for moving my company’s app to React was because the useState hook reminded me of Reagent’s ratoms. I believe that was at least part of their intent. The catch is that you can’t really enforce immutability or atomic updates in plain JS, so they built hooks into the library as a workaround.
There’s not much of a cognitive difference between “defining a reagent component which uses ratoms and calls a pure function that derefs, updates or swaps them”, and “defining a react functional component that uses hooks”. It looks weird to have the “atoms” inside the render function instead of outside, and there are the aforementioned limitations (“the rules of hooks”), but it’s a compromise to get the feature into JS React in a consistent, performant manner.
I’d love to use CLJS/Reagent or even go full re-frame on our front-end codebase, but that’s a hard sell at my company since I’m the only dev who’s ever played with Clojure.
Functional components are great in that they are more terse, less boilerplate.
Class components just have more lines, more boilerplate, so they have a higher cognitive load. But when you have state, you have more complexity, you can't just wave your hand wave and make it go away. You need to take the complexity into account.
Hooks are trying to do hand waving. The thing is, once you get to non-trivial use cases, the handwaving stops working. You're better off thinking a lot about where you state lives in your component hierarchy, and then limit your state to where you really need it. Once you do that the overhead of class components doesn't really make that big a deal.
The same principle applies to almost everything in programming, the more thought you put into structure, the simpler you can make everything.
Nope, I'm with you. React inventing a half-baked, partial re-implementation of objects/classes (in a language that already has them!) with super-weird declaration syntax & runtime behavior, just to avoid telling their userbase "Ok you will have to use classes sometimes, for certain functionality", was when I started looking around, because they were clearly out of real problems to solve that were sufficiently good-looking-on-a-résumé, and it was just gonna go downhill from there.
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Often, things don't get bloated because the developers are bored, it stems from users requesting features because they are doing it wrong.
Sort of how AWS keeps mucking with Lambdas so that thier customers can keep doing it wrong and paying too much.
Or how doctors just give patients scips if they ask about a drug and it won't incur them any liability.
Over and over I have seen the world shout the praises of a new paradigm that solves a problem...except they totally misunderstand the concept and run in an unintended direction. No one can fight that momentum. So they don't. It happens with nearly everything in tech.
Well. Life moves in waves, but historically, over a long enough time frame (and if we manage not to kill ourselves), more lessons will be learned than lost, and life gets increasingly better.
I still remember the Parcel or Prettier saga. The first, the no-configuration bundler, the other, the no-configuration opinionated code formatter.
Then, for their next big major release, the big feature was adding configuration to make it even more powerful!
I haven't used them in a while so my memory might be hazy, but this is exactly the phenomenon you've described. I wonder if it's insecurity or trying to please the crowd that simple niche tools in the frontend end up being configurability behemoths. There's always a time in a JS library where someone decides to rewrite the whole thing and add plugin support, and that's the time that library goes to shit.
Over long enough time you get Webpack, with more knobs than the Linux kernel, and cycles back to a version that tries to be smart and not require any configuration anymore, like 1.0 did.
Mainly Vue. It's OK and pretty widely used, which gets you decent library support and such. If I were starting from scratch and didn't have organizational/team inertia & experience to consider, I'd probably give things like htmx a hard look.
I'd have to re-evaluate the current Android landscape because it's been a while, but I might still consider React Native only for that platform, because having RN smooth the rough edges off Android dev made it a lot more pleasant and quick, with far less time lost fighting the platform and working around/replacing bad 1st party stuff piecemeal. But maybe it's gotten better-enough in the last 4ish years that it's no longer tempting to drag in RN just to avoid native Android dev.
In general though, I just no longer default to advocating React for highly-interactive sites or "webapps", as I did for a while.
It is purely because `this.state` is hard for V8 to optimize, nothing more and nothing less. They did it for their own purposes, for better performance on low-end machines. You can almost certainly just use classes for 99% of use cases
Funny that this whole hooks mess could have probably been better resolved with investment in developing optimization patches for v8 rather than attempting to "fix" React
How would Facebook convince the community to dogfood their new API without some marketing buzz? It's pretty obvious that V8 has trouble optimizing changes to object properties because of the design of the spec, and they were also pretty open about it in the blogs where hooks were introduced. I think it's also clear that useEffect is harder to grok than it's lifecycle equivalents, so there might be other things at play than composability.
It's also a bit funny that certain kinds of people can just brush off these things with some non-sequitur on a message board when there are almost always bigger things at play.
I was just going off my own experience with React through the years. It was very hard to compose behavior with class based components. We had to create higher order components that had functions as children which could pass down data as arguments to the child function. It really made a mess of the component hierarchy. Now you can create reusable custom hooks that can be used from any component.
Additionally, the React team has talked about how hooks and function components allow them to have "forks" of the component tree in various states of partial completion at a time, for use with Suspense and transition features. This works because closures capture data in a scope, whereas mutable class instances could have gotten changed and refer to a single `this` instance.
One of the few reasonable comments in this thread.
Hooks are better than HOCs, no this is better than managing this, and dependency arrays are better than if (this.props.fooBarBaz !== newProps.fooBarBaz || this.props.onFooBarBazChanged !== newProps.onFooBarBazChanged || …)
> This works because closures capture data in a scope, whereas mutable class instances could have gotten changed and refer to a single `this` instance.
So `this.state` is hard to optimize?
> Hooks had nothing to do with v8 optimizations or `this.state`.
Huh? That's what you just said. The spec makes it hard to optimize. The JIT compiler can't infer enough about the shape of the data.
It's not about "optimization" in the sense of "how fast can the v8 interpreter execute lookups on the class instance" or anything like that.
It's about "when this function executes, what data does it see, and did any of those values get changed out from under it in a way that could potentially break the logic"?
> It's about "when this function executes, what data does it see, and did any of those values get changed out from under it in a way that could potentially break the logic"?
You're just describing the semantics of functions versus classes, and the consideration has existed long before hooks came around for exactly the reasons you describe. This discussion has also existed long before JavaScript, React, or hooks existed obviously. It's secondary to the discussion because function components have existed for a long time.
None of what you're saying changes the fact that replacing classes and lifecycles with hooks was done despite the fact that 99.9% of the API users would never care about the performance implications of classes, while that is precisely why the React team made the change. JavaScript is plenty composable with classes and without nested useEffect calls, which is one of the most absurd foot gun APIs that I have seen released in my entire career.
I'm legitimately curious. Can you point to a single actual source to cite "the React team made the change to hooks because of JS engine performance"? (and when you say "performance", you _are_ talking about literal instruction execution time / JIT behavior / etc, that sort of thing?)
I'm pretty deeply tied into the React ecosystem, and I honestly can't remember _ever_ seeing that mentioned as a justification.
If you can link me a reference with them saying that, I'd both be interested in reading it, but honestly surprised to see that stated at all.
Oh, absolutely. Pretty much every distinctive feature of prototypal OO is best classed as "please, never ever actually use this". Adding the "class" sugar and general agreement to pretend the prototypal stuff isn't there, though, made JS OO usable-enough. But yeah, it's not great.
This thread may have an OP who prefers classes, but I'm for one 100% in favor of hooks. You could struggle and suffer to solve them with classes, or you could move on to something better.
I ditched React soon after they released hooks, mainly because I couldn't relate to the tradeoff React roadmap was taking from there. They went in a different direction from that point onwards, it seem like whatever code you write will become obsolete with the new set of best practices in the next release cycle.
More importantly, I realized React is trying to tame Facebook level of problems and hence their design decision steams from those data points. I develop small/medium type of frontend apps which doesn't need to apply solutions developed for such a scale.
These days I'm using Hotwire[1] (Turbo + Stimulus) with fair amount of vanilla javascript libraries in my apps. Occasionally, when I need to develop a reactive piece of UI I reach out for Svelte[2]
I'm quite happy after making the move. My apps complexity has reduced drastically and there is huge boost in my overall productivity.
Because HR (and IT strategy) nowadays is a farce, managers, decision-makers and the actual organizational units that do hiring rarely have the necessary systemic big-picture knowledge/information, foresight, experience, longitudinal thinking that would allow them to venture out of their preset suboptimal ways.
It's usually perfectly reasonable, but not really optimal. In this job market requiring React seems worse than hiring someone that is a good frontend developer and has the wits and eagerness to pick up React and whatever tools the team uses, and the job requires.
This has the advantage that when - inevitably - tool1 gets deprecated and tool2 arrives you'll have someone that can adapt and learn, and likely you'll also have someone who can teach.
The worst experience so far was for a general full stack role. They sent me a 3 page long PDF of job "requirements" which was a lot of fluff and implicit stuff. I get it... but I think that can be reserved for later. Not the best offer, seemed like they were disorganized in general, etc.
The best experience was for the best TC offer _and_ most relevant position for me... they sent over half a page that didn't waste a single character. Named a few frameworks but they had a crystal clear idea of what they needed. It was amazing, lol.
> I realized React is trying to tame Facebook level of problems and hence their design decision steams from those data points.
Strong agreement!
There's a saying in community organizing and activist circles that goes something like:
"Don't apply the solutions of the butterfly to the problems of the caterpillar."
Imho it's a really important consideration when thinking about scale of movements (and nonprofits... and any community initiative...). This is especially true when "professional" people are always coming in and confidently over-applying their learnings in corporations to thinking about activism (which often, though not always, has very different incentive structures and lifecycles).
I think about this parable often in regards how all these scaled tech companies end up stewarding
the developer tools and therefore practices for everyone. And they tend to out-pace and out-broadcast other wonderful tools that could better serve the majority of developer niches.
I don't have a strong opinion either way but if you left React because you are frustrated with code becoming obsolete and picked up Hotwire, a significantly smaller framework, arnt you likely to run into the same problem if Hotwire doesnt end up being the next big framework?
In 5 years if no one else is using Hotwire then your code is obsolete, no?
I liked working in next.js in the past but my company was already talking about Nuxt.js when we hadnt even fully converted to next. Feels like jumping ships from a ship with some major flaws, but will continue to float for x+ years, onto a lifeboat that may or may not make it another 500 feet before sinking.
I think that's the opposite of what he is saying. Because React is updated and changes frequently, your code becomes obsolete unless you update to follow the latest changes. In theory, if everyone abandoned Hotwire, your code would never be obsolete or need changes, because Hotwire would never change. In reality, as browsers and web standards change, frameworks need updating.
React doesn't change frequently though, that's the point. And it has always had excellent backwards compatibility. Class components are still fully supported, for example.
React changing best practices every few years is a good thing! It means it keeps getting better.
That would be a bad thing if it meant that earlier best practices were no longer maintained. But that’s not true. Class components are still around. All official documentation continues to have class component examples and explanations (where it makes sense obviously…there isn’t any class component documentation under hooks, of course). And class components will likely still be around 5 years from now.
All the class components people wrote still work and can be maintained. React doesn't overhaul everything like Angular did. You can have function components with hooks and also have your old class components in the same app.
Step 1: The existing tooling is too clunky, big and a major PITA to work with, Developers spend most of their time fighting their framework and tooling to do simple things.
Step 2: Someone gets fed up with this writes a framework that "does things right" and is designed for "simplicity"
Step 3: People start loving the new tool because it is so much easier to work with.
Step 4: People start to do things the tool wasn't designed to do. They start making "minor feature enhancements" to the tool so that it can fit more use cases.
Alternative Step 4: Tool becomes "industry standard" so everyone starts using it because it is "the right way", regardless of whether or not it is a good fit.
Step 5: The new tool becomes massive and bloated and overwhelmed with too many features, configurations, and options.
Step 6: Return to step 1.
> The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Web 2.0 Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the great mountainous island of FANNG. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”
This tired argument has been trotted out repeatedly, and isn't really funny anymore. It's just old and boring.
For people like me who are new to JS and use these sorts of discussion to determine which technologies I should adopt first, it's really just pointless noise in the channel.
The little I know about JS so far, I definitely know this joke is tired and played out.
It's not a joke, it's intended to convey the wisdom of not thinking "the next big thing" will solve all your problems, it is intended to focus on the importance of fundamentals, and of relying on using engineering skill to solve problems rather than fancy gadgets, it is to point out the value of developing technical acumen rather than becoming a tool bound technician.
If you define yourself by the technology you work with you aren't an engineer you're a technician.
adopt better methodologies, languages (TS, ReasonML, etc), find what works for you, automate the hard part, find reusable patterns, don't settle for the popular but mediocre new stuff (eg. React)
I understand your frustration, but I think you’re missing what is actually meant to be a helpful takeaway from this.
Essentially, all these frameworks ARE part of a cycle that repeat, and in time we all start to see it. Most of them just iterate on previous concepts, with some core concepts going way back to the late 60s, 70s and 80s.
What remains the same is the underlying Javascript language itself, and more importantly, fundamental software engineering and computer science principles.
Learn the fundamentals, and they will help you learn every new framework and language more easily, and in more depth.
If you really just want to get a job using JavaScript, then you might be best off browsing job postings to see what kinds of companies are hiring for which frameworks, and go from there.
But if your goal is literally to learn JS and find the right tech stack for you, unfortunately there is no replacement for learning the basics, and then picking a framework that looks interesting, and building something in it to see if it clicks with you.
I have been doing Rails development for past 10 years now and I never faced a dilemma where the framework took a direction which isn't aligned with its core vision.
I have been just trying to find a similar tool for frontend where I don't have to keep rewriting the entire codebase.
I think Rails was able to avoid this because of its modular structure and ease to write gems that extend the framework in a way that fits your project's circumstances and needed tradeoffs. As DHH famously said Rails is omakase, but you can also make reasonable substitutions.
You are correct, Rails and Ruby are one of the few places I haven't felt like there's been constant and unedning churn, I attribute it to the incredible flexibility and power of the Ruby programming language, which incidentally is my favorite language to work in.
What about the webpack rails7 situation? I feel like rails has guessed wrong too many times about FE (coffeescript, asset pipeline, websockets) that I don't trust them to deliver their own stack.
I'm not sure this is a fair representation. Rails didn't "guess wrong" too many times. They chose the best option available at the time. Remember, CoffeeScript was used in Rails in 2010! Brendan Eich even borrowed many ideas from CoffeeScript in subsequent versions of JavaScript. Ditto, the asset pipeline solved a great number of problems for many years. With recent advances in web browsers, many of these problems aren't really problems, so it's less relevant, and Rails has to take advantage of import maps as an alternative.
> The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Web 2.0 Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the great mountainous island of FANNG. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”
In case you don't know. This is a variation of the first paragraph of the Wheel of Time book series by Robert Jordan. Each book opens with a variation of this same paragraph
After a few trips around the wheel you'd think that people would realize "hey, we rewrote our entire react app, we were good little developers, we did the right thing,.. but that path led nowhere"
> when I need to develop a reactive piece of UI I reach out for Svelte
I never used Svelte, but I feel that "develop a reactive piece of UI" is basically Stimulus' job description. Can you explain a scenario/task where Stimulus does so poorly, that you flip the switch and use Svelte instead?
Stimulus was made by people who hate JavaScript and deliberately and pointlessly avoids JavaScript conventions. If you hate JS, you might like it, but I like JS, so I hate Stimulus. My preference is for Alpine.js, but Svelete is cool too.
I liked classes to-- their lifecycle methods were so clear to work with.
That said, learning how useEffect replaces lifecycle methods is pretty quick to pickup. As is useState.
The lesser known hooks are what are difficult for me to understand. useRef is pretty clear. useMemo? I'm not quite sure what it's for, but I imagine it's not too tough to figure out if I spend a bit of time learning & experimenting with it.
So, although I liked the simplicity of class components, functional ones aren't too bad. They bring in some additional complications, but with a bit of effort it seems to all be learnable to me.
Howard Lewis Ship kept changing the paradigm for Tapestry every major release or two. He could have had something to take the spot that Spring eventually filled, but these big gear shifts I think left people with a lot of rework and at some point it seems like porting your code to something more architecturally stable is a better bet.
It’s challenging though to keep supporting an API contract that you don’t believe in anymore. Or especially that you are causing you and others pain. I think sometimes maybe the thing to do is pass the baton and work on something else, but we also punish people for abandoning things. Like the author of Groovy, who hopped around from project to project and lost people.
I totally agree. I actually stopped using React around the time hooks were announced. In retrospect it's still not clear if hooks were even a good idea.
Changing the core methodology of a project used by millions of developers at the time was extremely irresponsible. They basically made obsolete all React educational resources overnight. I'm sure people making money by producing React educational content were very happy about that though.
There was no way to make async rendering possible with classes. It was necessary and they spent a lot of time trying different approaches that'd continue the old paradigm, but it couldn't be done.
As opposed to what? Vue is slower and Angular too. Perhaps Svelte might be faster but the programming paradigm is a little weird. Writing pure JS is bullshit - I tried it few months ago and even a very simple app - for public transport schedules - got very unmanageable very quickly.
I'm currently working on a project with hundreds of reactive components shown at any given time (very extensive financial analytics/modeling collected from over 500 data sources and real-time updated). Async rendering is a godsend. Perhaps React isn't for you if you don't see the need.
Lol, you really think someone is going to stray off the well-supported path for apps like these for 1-10% gain? This app shows a loading indicator quite a lot. Speed is important but nobody cares about raw speed this much. What we care about is a well-maintained library with significant ecosystem that's still going to be there in 2030 and it's super-easy to find devs and/or get help. The libs there are beta quality at best - maybe in few years.
The point is I'm not going to compare against small libs with no ecosystem, slow maintenance, small community and low amount of developers ready to use it - these new libs sound nice but it's beta software, not something to be used in production for apps like I work on. Speed is important but not this important.
What remains is React, Angular and Vue - and out of these React wins by a huge margin, also thanks to async rendering.
I'm looking forward having another look at the remaining libs in a few years.
Just for the opposite perspective, I started using React when hooks came out and I love them. I can write the classes, I often have to for job interviews, but I think they’re a messy abstraction.
Hooks just match the way the React runtime works. Classes are just way easier to do weird bad stuff with. I’m
not sure I would ever choose React if it was still class based. I’d use Ember probably which gives you more with the class-oriented API. Without the simplified control flow of hooks, I don’t see what React even offers over Ember or Vue.
Class component is still fully working as of latest React and won't be going away (at least according to the React docs). The main issue is when you work on a codebase that's full of function components and hooks it's hard to mix in class components.
I think the problem is ES6 classes just aren't very flexible or expressive, compared to systems like Ruby, Smalltalk, or CLOS. For a lot of programmers, half-assed classes are worse than no classes, even when they can help with organizing state and behavior.
I overall agree. I use functional style programming a lot but for some reason hooks have always confused me. The component classes generally make sense to me and map onto other paradigms like flutter, vue, etc.
Sure methods like componentDidMount are a mouthful but I found it much more explicit
In my view, hooks are more about managing state dependencies, rather than functional programming, per se. So they're more useful for simplifying methods like componentDidUpdate, rather than componentDidMount. When you need to detect changes by comparing prevProps to this.props or prevState to this.state, the logic can quickly get really ugly. Instead you can just put the relevant prop or state you want to monitor in the dependency list of a hook, and it will be triggered whenever that dependency list changes.
me too use effect is too hard to track for anything but the trivial cases, class components are a good midway between being able to understand the program in 3 years and not having to manage one own state<>view mapping
Class components are great. One thing I did see at my old job, however, was people extending the class components, sometimes 10+ times, which was very unexpected and harder to reason about. With functional components and hooks, you enforce proper composition.
It really rather seems like they achieved a near-perfect library for creating complex web applications, then in order to justify continued work on the project, simply kept making up unnecessary clever/cool features motivated by vibes that classes are passé.
They absolutely do not have their place. Just about everything is worse with class components. I’ll take a dozen useEffects over a single class component any day.
That said, the hooks model is far from perfect. They give you a lot of rope to hang yourself with and were badly introduced. Within weeks the internet was ablaze with terrible advice.
When so many people get it wrong, the library is to blame. And I wish hooks were as robust as Solid.js’ signals model.
I don't think hook themselves are a bad thing. But the way react implements hook probably is. The react team invented their hook format the suite themselves the most, but that probably isn't for other.
Vue 3 also has hook now. But none of these defects in the article exist.
In vue.
To use some value in a effect, you just use it and it is tracked.
If you need to clear up your code. You cut some code into a useXxx function, and your reusable utility is done. You can use it everywhere now. You don't really need to specify dependency of whatever by yourself.
If you must manipulate a dom, you just manipulate it. It will work as long as you revert the change before vue want to update it again.(And vue do provide a hook for you to attach a handler when these happen)
These restrictions are added by the way react implements hook, but not hook themselves. Hooks are just more user friendly services (by allow the hook to attach to component instance without all the glue codes(addListener or whatever))
I used it in a few project. And it reduces the code by a lot.
For example. To make a mutex to prevent duplicate submit of form. You use need to declare a instance field and wraps the code that do the submit. That alone is 3 lines of code but don't even include error handling.
> Vue 3 with the composition API looks fantastic on paper. (I haven’t used it in any meaningful way)
Recently worked on migrating a large codebase over from a legacy solution to Vue 3 with composition API, it was a pretty enjoyable experience, especially with Pinia!
Though I'd say that the problem was that most component libraries/frameworks out there actually don't support Vue 3 well enough. Last I checked, only the following were viable with Vue 3:
- Ant Design
- Element Plus
- PrimeVue (went with this, also has icons and a layout solution; also alternatives available for React and Angular)
Most of the other ones considered weren't quite there yet:
- Vuetify
- Quasar
- BootstrapVue
- Vue Material
- Buefy
- View UI
- Vuikit
- Chakra UI
I mean, is it really so hard to get a bunch of pre-built components for Vue 3 with Bootstrap, or Bulma? It feels a bit like the Python 2 to Python 3 migration in some respects.
> Most of the other ones considered weren't quite there yet
From what I recall, quasar managed to update very quickly.
Vuetify is currently in Beta for Vue 3 as they went with a greenfield rewrite to deal with tech debt. I rolled it out to a production site recently and it works well.
BootstrapVue completely dropped the ball, despite the corporate sponsorships the original maintainers went missing for a whole year & bailed. It got new maintainers at the start of the year, but they've been delayed by current geopolitical events.
Instead of a clear message about what caused that loop and maybe a walkthrough of the last N iterations (which changes caused which logic to be triggered), the error message was just a vague and lazy error (even AngularJS errors were better back in the day, filling in details in the docs as URL parameters).
Then again, over the years I've formed the opinion that both approaches are bad, just in different ways. There is no silver bullet, just look at how even desktop software and UI solutions struggled to be workable throughout the decades, of course things won't be that much better in regards to front end.
However, Vue's approach to hooks seems refreshing: creating and nesting components still isn't as easy as in React, but getting things done feels a little bit less cryptic and not as confusing, especially with something like Pinia!
Hooks are a natural progression from class components, class components seem more straightforward with all the willMount beforeMount etc. but they trick you into visualizing your component in different states of mounted/rendered/etc. That goes against what React wants to be at its core, which is totally immutable and pure, it isn't mounted or pre/post-render it looks the same whether it is the first render or the 100th. Ultimately I think the mental model of the component as a pure function is superior to juggling the react lifecycle.
Class components were/are fantastic for training new devs because of how easily abstracted the mental model is compared to memorizing all the hooks and their use cases. Obviously, the syntax tends to be a bit more verbose in general, and I won't deny that hooks making improving performance easier, but at the end of the day I prefer code that's readable whether it was written yesterday or 5 years ago - even if it costs like 20 more lines of boilerplate.
I also think the fear of verbosity in this post is why I can't take it too seriously. Solo maintaining a not-so-old Expo application which uses React Navigation, I constantly have to rewrite large sections of code due to constant refactorings to match whatever coding style is hot at the moment, as the 6 month deprecation deadline is constantly at my doorstep because I have bigger fish on my plate. SO answers being out of date isn't a problem because React is too old, it's a problem because of everyone wanting it to be shiny and new again, and React acquiescing to those demands.
The author does have a bit of a point with libraries, but I counter with Nessim Btesh's fantastic article regarding proper React style[^1]. In short, you shouldn't really be depending on libraries for production needs, just for prototyping.
You aren’t the only person, I’ve certainly heard it before. But I’m yet to hear a convincing rebuttal to Mixins Considered Harmful [1], the hooks talk [2] or the Motivation section [3] on the announcement.
The arguments I’ve heard is that it is “cleaner”, “more understandable” or the OO style is preferred. Some developers feel uncomfortable with hook magic because it introduces a more niche programming concept than OO (e.g stateful functions). I don’t find these arguments compelling. What the React team managed to do was reproduce the same functionality as class components while decreasing the footguns associated with them.
I think there is more footgun in the hooks, especially rules of hooks. I worked with Junior dev and I can see unexperienced dev misused hooks more often than lifecycle.
I used to be the same when I switched jobs and had to start doing functional. I now disagree that there are ever instances a class is needed. You can use hooks to encapsulate and reuse state, contexts, etc
I am in the same boat. I miss class components so much, but because of the trend it is hard to fight for it.
It is just so verbose and easier to read. It is more in line with the majority of graphics/ui frameworks in the whole software engineering ecosystem. It reminds me of render loop in many game engines, along with special event triggers (mount, unmount etc.). It makes me feel like an actual programmer, rather than a "view orchestrator"...
Well, unfortunately treating hooks like they're the worst thing since the devil is just the latest (and most humorous) in a long trend wherein a new syntax is added to something, and every developer thinks "okay, the preexisting alternative is now old and bad". I've been scolded many times in code reviews for absent-mindedly making a class-based component instead of using hooks (mind you, this was a legacy codebase FULL of class-based components. Are react developers just undereducated? Considering how many developers I've seen spend MONTHS "learning hooks" I think so. (Not to mention, every single React project I've been on in the last 7 years has been me and some developer who's never used React before, but has a lot of shallow blogpost-driven opinions).
I'm with you. I much prefer class components. So much easier to understand and work with.
I disliked hooks after first trying them on their release, and I hate them now.
I'm still bitter that a senior engineer didn't step in and prevent them from destroying the react ecosystem. I wonder if they were have been squashed if React was developed outside Facebook?
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 335 ms ] threadI'm gonna say something crazy here, but hang with me: hypermedia.
an enhanced hypermedia model offers a lot more interactivity often at a fraction of the complexity, and w/ the benefits of the REST-ful architecture (flexibility, etc.)
By the way, all section titles in this article are song or album titles.
One of those rare exceptions, where overlaying another song improves the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huEtJw7pfLk
In time, I believe React can still take us forward.
Frontend craft has also become too complex in general. We really need to step back and decide whether all this fucking shit around SPA, SSR, route splitting, transpiling, everything-as-a-type, "me too" features between frameworks, overemphasis on trendy designs, package managers that wrap around other package managers, REST or GraphQL or RPC, etc. etc. etc. Much of which serves mostly to create corporate careers for developers more than to actually serve users.
React takes us forward in the sense that most of us don't want to go back to direct DOM manipulation or jQuery, and it's simple enough that it doesn't come with the same baggage as Vue, Angular, Ember, and so on. Even if React itself were to fade, the institution that is React I think will continue on for the foreseeable future.
I'm a developer that's done with this, but it brings in VC money so in my experience it serves mostly to create opportunities for CEOs to get some more money on the table via buzzword pitches.
There was recently a demo of what a Todo MVC app might look like if written in vanilla JS with today's apis. It looks fairly decent; I could see myself going back to something like that:
https://frontendmasters.com/blog/vanilla-javascript-todomvc/
Perhaps it can. I haven't really tried to write a large scale frontend app in vanilla that is similar in complexity to apps I've worked on that have millions of users. Maybe it's feasible, but it would take a lot of dedication to "do things right" by the developers on the team.
Also, reactive templates pretty much kill any desire I would have to by relying on direct DOM calls. With something like React or Svelte alone, there's practically no disadvantage to using them even strictly for rendering besides added file size. With vanilla, it would take more effort to make things efficient because you don't necessarily just want to call render() whenever something changes. It's really nice having a templating system that allows you to change things surgically without doing a lot of extra work rerendering things that shouldn't actually change.
However, I think vanilla JS rendering definitely has a place in terms of writing small, purposeful, modular components. Frameworks should make it straight forward to use vanilla components so that things that would be more succinct in vanilla can be written as such.
The part about the Inspector component and the rules of hooks I don't understand. I would have put the visibility state outside the Inspector component, and then there is no need for any conditional calling of hooks.
I know and agree this has been discussed to death, so please be patient while I beat this long-dead horse.
In the beta React docs, Context is described as: "Context lets the parent component make some information available to any component in the tree below it—no matter how deep—without passing it explicitly through props." [1]
In the docs prior to that, they go over how to use the useState hook to manage state [2]. In the paragraphs immediatly following, they describe how to drill props to pass that state around to child components and how to lift it up so it is easier to share [3].
So, while Context may not explicitly be about state management, it's positioned as a way to make managing state via prop drilling much easier. It's easy to see how someone new to React would come to the conclusion that Context is about state management. The React beta docs all but say so.
If the React team doesn't want developers to think about Context as state management, they should not implicitly position it as state management.
[1] - https://beta.reactjs.org/learn/passing-data-deeply-with-cont...
[2] - https://beta.reactjs.org/learn#updating-the-screen
[3] - https://beta.reactjs.org/learn#sharing-data-between-componen...
To me one of the biggest issue is that almost everyone is deeply afraid of prop drilling. Passing props around and having some local state works very well for large parts of many applications. With hooks we don't have deeply nested Higher-Order components anymore, if you pay a bit of attention you can have reasonably shallow component hierarchies and props work very nicely then.
Server-side state is a special case, I find that much easier to handle with something like React Query. But once that is done I don't see much need for any external state management library like Redux, useState/useReducer works pretty well.
And yes, sometimes Context is useful for state that doesn't change much. But those are the cases where the drawbacks don't matter. But that is a special case, not necessary for the vast majority of state.
Prop Drilling is considered an anti-pattern for good reason.
It very quickly turns your project into an absolute mess, making it impossible to determine where props are coming from and where data is actually set.
Keeping that clean is one of the most important things you can do in a frontend codebase imo.
With tsc and vscode, prop drilling has started to make a lot more sense to me.
Honestly, this is a point of confusion I see folks ask about _every_ day.
Context is a Dependency Injection tool for a single value, used to avoid prop drilling.
Redux is a tool for predictable global state management, with the state stored outside React.
Note that Context itself isn't the "store", or "managing" anything - it's just a conduit for whatever state you are managing, or whatever other value you're passing through it (event emitter, etc).
I ended up writing an extensive article specifically to answer this frequently asked question, including details about what the differences are between Context and Redux, and when to consider using either of them:
- https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2021/01/context-redux-diff...
I think the conflation came more from the "community" than from the React team itself. Many people were (ab)using Redux for simple cases were Context would have been sufficient and, in the process, paying the price of having a lot of boilerplate related to writing anemic "reducers" whose only purpose was to store things on the global state, and eventually also paying the price of having a ball-of-mud of a global state where no-one could be sure of the dependencies between components, as anyone could be accessing anything on that big ball-of-mud. (Been there; not proud.)
So, when the Context API came along, with a much leaner API (no actions or reducers) and less "global-y" feel than Redux, people who were misusing the latter naturally saw the former as a good replacement
For all the annoyances of Hooks, they really are a godsend when it comes to composing state. And refs do indeed suck, but they sucked even more with class based components. I can’t tell you how many times I was able to solve a complex DOM state issue with custom hooks wrapped around refs.
Newer tools like Svelte and Solid do look promising as far as removing boilerplate, but they personally feel a step too far off the path of “it’s just JavaScript.”
Has anyone else here successfully left for greener JS pastures?
This is so silly. Hooks are literally hooks into a scheduling algorithm you are at the mercy of. That scheduling algorithm is pure JS. Of course you don't have classical control flow in someone else's scheduler.
The key users are referring to when talking about "JS vs magic" is that React is just constructing objects and invoking functions, with known semantics, whereas Solid and Svelte are auto-magic-reactive systems without clear semantics rising from the choice to do even more things in their internal black boxes than React, such as never re-rendering components, dark compiler magic on syntax that doesn't naturally map to a JS tree, and other such things
While I use hooks without problem, I also feel like it is an invented mini-language with a lot of extra quirks. Maybe the problem is js does not map elegantly to some of these functional concepts without a good type system.
I’m not what sure what you mean by not “normal” JS functions, though? They’re an API provided by a framework, and — like all APIs — they have specific constraints that govern how they’re used.
To each their own. Although I use react and hooks, for my taste the hooks api is not very clean. All these are implicit not explicit and without linting they can easily result in runtime errors. But maybe I am spoiled by Elm ;)
No they don't, that's a suggested convention
> have restrictions on where to be called (that a program detects)
Yes, it is strange that they opted for this implicit approach, but this is the nature of interacting with a scheduling algorithm in real-time; it is with limitations
I agree they are clearly not unrestricted free-use JS, but they aren't a custom DSL hydrated by compile-time craziness, they are hooks into a scheduling algorithm to help you maintain consistent state in a giant tree. I'm not sure how that is ever going to be free. Perhaps a better type system can help but this is fundamentally complex
This is because hooks are just next() calls on an iterator. Is it magic and entirely because the devs thought it was more beautiful than having to pass a key like state = useState("state", 0)? Absolutely. Does it transcend JS, no.
They literally are.
> hooks aren’t JS
The code in React executing components relies on hooks running in a consistent order each time the component runs, but the existence of a runtime context that has expectations about side effects (and hooks are side effects) doesn't make it “not javascript”.
I don't have an opinion, just generally curious because it feels very odd that the order of my functions matter.
Adding visual noise to enable subtle bugs may not be a win.
Hooks are functions, and they are executed in the order called from within the component, which is itself a function, just like any other functions calls from within another function.
(The mechanism tracking calls to them and deciding whether the function passed to the hook needs to be called requires them to be called in the same order each time the component is executed; if they were called in order of definition rather than normal execution order this would be true by definition; the whole reason for the rule about not using flow control around them is that they are functions executed in normal flow order.)
I haven’t tried Solid, but Svelte has already paid considerable dividends for our team. Frontend feature development pace is faster, the code is generally leaner, and the developers love working with it.
Is that just down to Svelte, though? Or is it the greenfield effect? Projects always fly quickly at first, when the code is fresh and unconstrained, and you're building the basics.
My concern would be when things get complicated and you have to debug Svelte's binding magic - and I have very bad memories doing that in Angular and Knockout.
And I would caution against converting anything to a non JSX or hyperscript language (like svelte or vue), you don't want to tie your entire view to some HTML-like DSL IMO.
That being said, it’s been one year and making changes to the Svelte application is (in the developers’ opinions) easier than our set of comparably-sized React applications. Of course, all of this is specific to our team members’ skillsets, the application complexity, etc.
Seems like the obvious abbreviation for that is TL, so it's a joke on cross-language abbreviation collision.
We’ve turned this into a slight positive by pushing the business to allow us to make open source contributions. The developers seem to enjoy this a lot, and hopefully our work helps others in the space.
That’s more or less exactly what everyone said about JSX when it first arrived. Now people don’t really consider it. I suspect we might end up feeling the same way about Svelte’s language additions if they ever become commonplace.
That being said, the Vue2 -> Vue3 migration has felt pretty frustrating. It's felt like, with enough work, I could eventually get Vue to behave similar to React.
> I still think Vue (especially Vue 2) is the greatest of them all. I've worked professionally with Angular, React, and Vue. Each for several years. Vue is easily the winner for me with the syntax that closely matches native HTML and JS/TS and how it encourages clean separation of concerns and clean code. JSX/TSX is absolutely the worst for the latter, it's like the wild west. "But you don't have to write it that way" - yeah ok, but when you work in a large organization it's going to get written that way by your peers; good luck trying to stop it. Angular is just a clusterfuck of pipes and observables that require higher cognitive load to unravel when trying to understand a semi-complex block of code. Contrast with Vue where I can near instantly understand what it's trying to accomplish.
> This shit right here - {#if <condition>} {:else} {/if} - is why Svelte is deterring me. For the love of god, can we stop coming up with weird custom syntax for templating code? This is one area where Angular also pisses me off: *ngIf for example is just as hideous. With Vue: v-if, v-else. You add it as an attribute to native html, it's dead simple. No weird symbols, no braces or other oddball shit I have to look up when I step away from it for a few months and come back. It just makes sense right away.
I've simply stopped doing any frontend development contract work *. Until the whole JavaScript world pulls its head out of its bottom, I'll leave that niche to other people.
* I'll do JS and React if I really have to, but I'm actively avoiding any client-side focused projects.
I don’t believe in quitting cold turkey and I don’t think there’s anything available to fully replace all aspects of React. We’re instead gradually transitioning our internal ecosystem to use less React-specific stuff, positioning us to migrate (or not) in the next few years.
- Move from CSS-in-JS to vanilla CSS
- Avoid React-specific libraries, both developing them internally or when selecting third-party deps
- Keep business logic out of React components whenever possible
Etc
Lit is the anti-framework because it isn't a framework. Once you remove all the cruft, you can spend a lot more time writing the code that you want to write and, doing so in the way that you want to do it. Everything discussed in this article is solved by bare metal web components.
It is built on top of web-standard; I am surprised how (lit)tle attention it gets on HN (so far).
That is why it is not discussed that much. If you need to write components, then lit may work for you, but whoever wants to ise those components would prefer a js framework.
Also, lit is from Google. which makes it worse as Angular is from Google as well
You are right on components for other people -- but if all the components are for you or your company, ones you handcraft w/ Lit will be lighter weight and easier to write and fix.
I wish I could write everything with it.
1. https://mithril.js.org/
You are dealing with particular values and wiring everything meticulously.
Whenever I write stuff using https://rxjs.dev, writing React feels the same.
Using ExtJS years ago felt higher level than React.
I have never understood why people find state management challenging. I suppose its because they are stuck in a framework or MVC mindset where everything is a separate component and each must have separate state models that must be referenced frequently and independently. I just put all my state data in one object, save it on each user interaction, and use it only on page refresh. I have an entire OS GUI working like this and the state management part is only a few dozen lines of code.
Frameworks are like being locked in an insane asylum. You may not be crazy, but everybody else is and you have to follow all these extra rules you would never follow with freedom in the real world. But, the insane asylum provides you meals and bedding and many people can't be bothered to figure that stuff out without necessary hand holding.
I've given it a fair shake and I wish I could change this opinion. I'm trying not to rant so I'll stop here.
I do a cathartic exercise every time this stuff gets to me at a themed twitter account. It's pure vitriol: https://twitter.com/sisnode
[1] oftentimes I see the anti-react argument as "react sucks which is why I use Y framework". I'm saying they are all(?) a toxic trend that leads to terrible products; more complicated, harder to maintain, aggressively encouraging a glossary of programming antipatterns passing it off as elegance.
The more you deviate from one of the set of common conventions, often enforced by frameworks, the more you have to build on your own.
The larger your project gets, and the more developers who need to understand your code, and the more developers you need to hire and get onboarded quickly, the more that those extra rules start to make sense.
And once you've learned and internalized the patterns necessary to build larger systems, it becomes force of habit to just use it wherever, even if it's nominally easier without them. For most developers, a go-to pattern will be faster than working from first principles on every project.
Then you exactly describe MVC...
> state data in one object,
This is your model.
> save it on each user interaction,
This is your controller.
> and use it only on page refresh.
This is your view.
MVC is a relatively simple concept, and it works well.
edit - fwiw I too am another heartbroken React dev
We must work on very different kinds of projects. I really can't imagine plain JS being a viable or appealing solution compared to Vue, which gives me very little grief at all.
Doesn't that mean you can never reflect state updates in the DOM without refreshing the whole page?
> I have never understood why people find state management challenging
Automatically determining what DOM objects need to be updated in response to a change in state and updating them without a page refresh adds a lot of complexity, if you completely ignore that requirement then state management would be simple like you said.
Also, it has amazing ESLint rules that really help keep all your code aligned and following best practices.
(1) https://unpoly.com/ (2) https://lit.dev/
React and friends really do make certain things easier and "nicer". But when you sit down and think about it, those things aren't that bad with vanilla JS. It really makes me wonder what value React et al is adding for the cost in KB and mental overhead.
> Form libraries are portly maintained or documented
The two-way data binding in Svelte saves ~4 lines of reusable hook function but doesn’t come close to covering defaults, validation, errors, dependent fields etc - all of that is essential complexity.
Write your own form field hook. The state model for a form is simple - what is a 3rd party library bringing to the table in terms of state management? I have more pain explaining what I want to a 3rd party library than I do writing a bit of code myself to do the same thing. I reach for open-source input components from a vendor for things like credit cards, but manage the state myself.
> useContext and useEffect have annoying dependency tracking; I prefer Solid’s mutable state and automatic dependency tracking.
React’s built-in hooks are positioned as building blocks with clear-cut contracts. Why dump Redux for bare useContext if you prefer Redux’s selectors? Just use Redux. If you like the Solid style of automatic dependency tracking and mutable state, just use Mobx - it’s a mature library for that style that’s been around for 7+ years, and is used in production by products like Linear and Cron.
Overall I agree that function components in React are difficult to get right for developers and a bit too verbose. There’s an onboarding tradeoff to every abstraction you layer over the framework’s APIs, but there’s large advantages too. Do so judiciously to find the sweet spot for your team & scale.
Based on the RealWorld projects, Svelte saves you around 50% in loc vs React.
https://medium.com/dailyjs/a-realworld-comparison-of-front-e...
You can see the React+Redux implementation here:
https://github.com/khaledosman/react-redux-realworld-example...
Sure. but it is better for 99% tasks. And remaining 1% can be achieved via other APIs
1. yes, un/controlled forms are messed up and need work
2. yes, contexts should replace Redux and Redux should go away. but in practice having a few contexts is pretty manageable. Currently we use Redux for all the dynamic state and contexts for everything else and it works pretty well. It is quite easy, also, to write your only little `useSelector()` wrapper around a non-mutating context value (ie: the context has a callback on changes, you listen and filter updates, then update a `useState` to trigger rerender)... but but maybe this a bit too abstract to actually want to do.
3. yes, forwardRef is silly.
4. yes, useEffect is kinda broken. My main issue which wasn't discussed much here is that the difference between `useEffect(..., [])` and `useEffect(...)` is insane. The latter should not exist, or have a different name entirely.
Otherwise, I really don't mind tracking deps _that much_, although I hate that it's hard to have an effect that updates 'on some local variable changes but not others', so in practice I pretty much ignore the lint warnings all the time.
It all feels like "there's a DSL waiting to be written for this stuff, similar to how JSX makes createElement() more ergonomic, but it doesn't exist yet".
That said, Solid doesn't seem like the answer. Solid's even worse: now you're using JSX for if/else statements, instead of the actual DSL you want that doesn't exist yet. Good luck running a debugger on that. (Although actually, if the Solid AST ends up in the Devtools view, that's pretty good. But still: this needs a fully-featured DSL).
5. +1, yeah, the continuing addition of weird hooks feels like a mistake that will eventually be regretted.
6. The right way to do your Inspector example is to have a parent component that decides whether it's rendered, and a separate child which does all the event listeners. It is a bit weird to me that React doesn't allow this to be done in one place. The closest thing is defining another component inline in the first one and then immediately rendering it. But for readability it's best to just have two separate components.
7. +1 to old docs getting in the way. I'd love to see a React 2 with a new name that deletes all the class component stuff entirely so that all of the docs about it are up-to-date. I've been toying with trying to work on this myself.
8. Yeah, fuck FB
9. Yeah, I'm not going to any of the other frameworks either. React is great, it's just ... not... great enough. I am in the middle of writing a series of blog posts about exactly this and I haven't finished yet but anyway here's the first one that I have written about why I like it so much? https://alexkritchevsky.com/2022/09/17/react.html
When you want to have "early return" in a component, it's possible to just split the component into two to introduce an "inner" component that contains whatever comes after the early return point in the original component.
Any local variables from before the early return then need to be passed as props to the new inner component.
However, naming this inner component is always an issue for me. Typically I just name them Inspector2, Inspector3, etc. until I have an implementation that works. Then I can start thinking about how to refactor the implementation into something that I can give sensible names.
It's really a code transformation similar to async/await where you derive a state machine from a block of code by identifying transition points. In async/await you have transitions at the await points; in components you have transitions at the early return points. In async/await, no one is forcing you to name the individual states or even write them out explicitly - the compiler takes care of it. Then why do I have to write out the state machine explicitly and name the states explicitly for function components with early return? I would love for React to have some facility like "Consider the rest of this component as a new sub-component; as if this component now returns a single Element pointing to whatever is in the rest of this component". But it's probably a Hard Problem™.
Wrapping components lets you have layers that don't have to care about what's going on inside. HOCs just let you write those layers in a way that can be composed. In your example, `isVisible` could be its own HOC, and then the inner component can have whatever name it needs.
Don't substitute memes for thinking. Evaluate what I've built on its actual merits.
Serious question: what was the motivating factor that made you take the time to reach for that cartoon and respond to me with it?
What distinguishes your framework?
Who should use it?
What does it do? And more importantly, what doesn't it do?
This is on my list for the 1.0 release. Unofficially...
Edit: You motivated me to rough something out, take a look here: https://tinyurl.com/joystick-comparison
> What distinguishes your framework?
Simplicity and stability, primarily, and second: scope.
The current crop of frameworks seeks to overcomplicate APIs and are indecisive about how things should be done (as evidenced by the introduction of patterns that are "the way" one day and then a few months later are "deprecated"). This leads to a lot of confusion at the community level which makes it hard to build software that can endure overtime (I came to this conclusion through teaching developers and realizing how much time was wasted chasing the proverbial rabbit of indecision).
Even worse, these frameworks introduce their own languages/syntax which are foreign to what a beginner would learn (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). This not only creates confusion and slows down the learning process, but it also creates the long-term nightmare of developers not understanding the fundamentals of the tools they use to build. Eventually, you hit a drop-off point where people think that, for example, JSX is HTML and in a pinch where they can't use React, are ineffective or incapable of completing the task properly.
By contrast, Joystick is designed to be stable, long-term, from the beginning (i.e., no random "hey, we're deprecating all this stuff you depend on for this more confusing API that's less descriptive"). It's also based on the core technologies of the web: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I don't introduce any hacks or sytnax tricks to render the component. It's plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This means that the transition from learning the basics of the web to shipping apps is far smoother (and an individual developer is less likely to make mistakes/get confused as everything looks consistent with where they started).
I also intentionally designed the component API to be fixed long-term. So, a component you write in Joystick today will look the same 10 years from now. My focus will be behind the scenes, improving performance and security. This matters less to developers and more to businesses (my target) as a lot of time and money is wasted on developers who are more focused on tinkering with technology (and making messes) than actually building the thing they're supposed to build.
For scope: Joystick is a full-stack framework, not front-end only. The UI part (@joystick.js/ui) is designed to snap in to the back-end/server part (@joystick.js/node). The advantage is that you're not wasting time trying to stitch together disparate parts that may or may not work together (or even worse, may or may not be supported long-term).
> Who should use it?
SMBs, startups, and freelancers/contractors. For SMBs/startups, it's a solid framework for shipping custom software for your business (or a consumer/b2b SaaS) that you can rely on long-term. So, build it today and maintenance is limited to some patch upgrades and new features/improving existing features. Never a surprise refactor being plopped on the roadmap, distracting you and your team from delivering value to customers.
For freelancers/contractors, remove the overwhelm of juggling a bunch of disparate codebases across clients that each have their own shifting requirements (i.e., standardize what you ship, full-stack). This allows you to take on more work, but also, make your long-term support more predictable as the framework you're building on isn't going to rug pull you down the road. This allows you to build a better business with happier clients.
> What does it do? And more importantly, what doesn't it do?
It allows you to define routes on the server which when matched, render some HTML, CSS, and JavaS...
One of the biggest level ups I had was extracting complex hooks into their own .js files instead of stuffing next to component code. This helps a lot with readability/reusability.
Overall I liked what I came up with, but it felt like a lot of inventing stuff on my own, which I'm not sure if the next developer who comes along will appreciate.
If one member doesn't understand all of the nuances of useEffect or paint useCallback, they can write a component or custom hook that another team uses and gets subtle bugs from.
For example, I need to look inside of a hook to see whether the callback it provided was wrapped in useCallback. That means I can't truly rely on the abstraction since I need to learn it's internals.
What's funny to me about this is that React people expressed so much hatred for Angular 1 for its "digest loop" and the difficulty of debugging infinite digest loops. And here we are, difficult to debug infinite digest loops in React that don't even give you the courtesy of raising an error after too many iterations.
And how much logic you put into a component is up to you. Your components can be almost entirely view logic, with any other data fetching or computation offloaded to other regular js files.
A lot of React code I run into these days would be simpler and less verbose with a traditional (non-function) React component.
They'll almost certainly never go away without a major version bump because it would break way, way too many sites, but at some abstract level people feel class components will have a shorter shelf-life than functional. And certainly, any given third-party integration to React in the future is allowed to just say "We only support functional components" (with the corresponding hit to popularity, of course).
Interesting that you didn't comment at all about my take on functional components not being the best tool for every job in React. Curious – do you have an opinion?
The major issue is life cycle. When is a class component instance created or destroyed? The answer is "whenever the framework feels like it," and that's a really ugly model for instance life cycle. Additionally and most importantly, it means that member variables on a React class component instance don't work the way that members are expected to work; you just can't rely on them having any particular value because the framework can create or destroy an instance when it feels like it for performance reasons. What good is a class and instance abstraction if when you try to use member variables (one of the key features of object-oriented programming) you're highly likely to just break the model in hard-to-debug ways?
Because the framework isn't using class component instances like instances are supposed to be used, the React team is tossing that model to the curb.
The best way we found is a custom useForm hook (simple to code, using useState's):
very flexible, you can use other wrappers than form or inputreact-query is another super useful lib, you could use useMutation() for implementing useForm actually
Most of these libraries are fine for simple to medium complexity forms. However once you cross a certain level of complexity these libraries become impediments rather than tools. I probably could have used a redux implementation but build my own state management API with a mixture of object oriented as well as functional programming. The values of the inputs persist so you want objects, but hiding/validating/calculating need to be reset for each change so I used a functional approach for these other features.
React is not perfect and its easy to paint yourself into a corner. However as someone who used to write js for IE6 and has forgotten more js libraries that you can imagine (Dojo, ExtJS, Backbone, Ember, etc) I can tell you right off the bat its the best tool for the job. Not perfect, just like Javascript. Just know and accept its limitations and you should be able to get React to do what you want.
I fail to see the point in SPA apps for the majority of web apps. At my work we have an ancient Dojo frontend and a newer react one being build. Its a few list views that the user can filter and a few forms with validation. It's a ridiculous amount of complexity to avoid loading a page. I could do almost everything for half the effort with server side HTML from Django and a little bit of JQuery.
I ask at my work why we are doing this and no one seems able to give me a decent answer but we carry on down this path regardless.
Most everyone using React should be using Nextjs or similar level of frameworks. Server rendering comes out of the box. On the other hand, it really isn't too complex anymore. With Next, Sveltekit, Remix, Nuxt, and friends, you get simple, hardened tooling out of the box. And you've decoupled frontend from api which many teams find very helpful to split responsibilities and allow certain features to move at different paces.
Yes, in React, with Next.js.
I'm going to have to dynamically create html and attach event handlers based on data either way. Much rather do it all in Typescript than remember Django templates DSL and still do javascript, for the result of worse UI's, poor 3p library support, and awful state management between frontend and backend.
See Next, Nuxt, Remix, SvelteKit, Astro, Qwik City, etc.
I work on regular ol' websites, that have some pages containing some moderate interactivity – so a few years ago the project adopted React to handle the frontend. I've found the experience mostly OK, but I sometimes get the urge to simplify things by leaning more on server-rendering / maybe using the URL to capture state...
and then realize I can't, and that this is Just The Way It Is Now. Because now all our devs expect to use React (or more accurately, its vast ecosystem of 3rd party functions of varying quality) to accomplish anything, and we forgot to screen for hires who can write their own JS+HTML or who understand how the response/request process works in a web application. (oops!)
"React hires are easy to hire for" so that often drives decisions, but I am skeptical my project ever needed React (or any hyper-optimized-for-SPAs-feature).
https://dev.to/rajasegar/html-over-the-wire-is-the-future-of...
thinking of forms as a model that can be rendered is really valuable IMO. most UXes would be 10x easier to write if we had better standardization around the 'schema to UX' step
'form first UX' would also reduce the work of building cross-platform apps
guessing django is ramping up on its AJAX, but I think a real forms standard would need to understand AJAX -- users aren't going to remember to scroll down to a 'save' button. realtime validation also an AJAX issue, typeahead as well.
Is there anywhere good to find out what I have been missing out on having not kept up to date with Djano for the last few years? I really miss using it and am looking for a job using it again.
I'm using tortoise as my ORM; it feels like sqlmodels is worth exploring as an alternative -- sqlmodels is designed to integrate well with pydantic (so you DRY in messages) and with sqlalchemy (so you get their migration support).
I'm not sure if there's a fastapi / pydantic tool for generating form UX, but it might be doable to write one if not. (though styling could be tricky).
I notice myself still spending a lot of time writing basic CRUD routes. I don't know if this is a tools issue or just unavoidable.
I'm open to a tool like postgraphile to automate API on top of a DB schema, but I'm worried about the loss of control over messages, RBAC, and query design. I wish there were a python tool for mostly-declarative API route stubs -- would be simple to customize, and the purely-declarative routes could be shipped off to a postgraphile-like tool in the future.
I wish fastapi had better auth built in, but then again I wish this about django too -- I feel like I'm endlessly shopping for a third-party user auth server and haven't found it yet. Auth + admin were a huge investment at the beginning of my project, and in retrospect feels wasted.
Sure, it's often overkill and a functional component does the same thing with less code. Use a functional component in these cases. But if you're doing something more complicated then stop treating class components like the fucking devil. They have their place.
Great article, couldn't agree more with them.
Yes, seriously. Have you used it for more complex components? You can split your effects across multiple useEffects, and have a guarantee that they run completely independently of each other (especially since you know what their dependencies are). Compare that to lifecycle methods: you only have one per component. All your effects concerned with setup have to be piled into the same function, and their associated teardowns have to be elsewhere in another method. How do you audit a behavior's logic? How do you reuse that behavior in another component? It's not easy, and you can cause weird bugs depending on the order in which you run them.
Compare that to useEffect. Setup and teardown in the same function, which allows it to focus on just one behavior. And if you need to, it can be trivially pulled out into its own hook and reused across all your components.
For the cases when this is not possible, I agree, useEffect works better than classes lifecycle methods. But do you really want a system which caters to a small percent of use-cases at the expense of readability in others? And the improvement, to my eyes, is not that big anyway.
The hooks are my main gripe with React, but as the OP, I don't see a better alternative either - at least not one that would be worth a rewrite.
What am I using? What is the effect?
The effect.
> What is the effect?
The state-modifying (and thus side-effect-producing, or simply “effectful”) function passed as the first argument to useEffect.
Most of hooks could have been done incrementally on top of classes.
I also don't think this would be possible. Hooks are based on closures and injected state, which you can't do in a class since separate methods won't share the closure.
https://twitter.com/_developit/status/1567272951136788481
A lot of third party hooks are really good though, being able to hook a dependency rather than create higher order components saves a lot of time and is conceptually much easier.
How so? There is nothing that a class-based component can do that a hook-based component can't (EDIT: Except for error boundaries). I'd go as far as to say class-based components are strictly inferior because they force you split your behavior logic across lifecycle methods and are not easily composable. I've been able to support much more complex behavior easily with hooks (e.g., connection management), that would have been a nightmare with class-based components.
https://reactjs.org/docs/error-boundaries.html
We have reached a period of time where junior devs exist that did not cut their teeth on class components and have no idea of what the lifecycles are. They don't know how rendering works so they either throw up useless memoization everywhere or they don't bother to think of it.
The complexity of class components did not vanish. It was only swept under the rug. Take useEffect. It's overloaded to hell and back. It does too much and people continue to struggle with it. Another one, useRef. It's not really for refs, per se. You will end up using it for data other than refs because function instance variables aren't a thing. No one knows when to use useLayoutEffect or useCallback.
The fact of the matter is that it's not class components vs. hooks. It's that React's API sucks. It's always sucked. And it continues to suck.
And then it just stays fixed. You don't have to split up the logic across different lifecycle methods and remember to keep them in sync. They're consolidated into functions that can be trivially pulled out into their own hooks and reused.
React is definitely a more low-level framework that requires you to have some familiarity with how the scheduler works, and could benefit from a couple more built-in hooks. But the benefits are undeniable, they make writing and refactoring complex applications an absolute breeze. The fact that you can factor out some state-related behavior into a hook and trivially reuse it is incredible.
For example, take state. With hooks, you use useState. A very common pattern is to need to persist it in the URL to enable deep linking. You can literally just replace your useState call with useQueryParam from the use-query-params library [1] and have your component function identically. You just can't do that with class-based components.
[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/use-query-params
That's not strictly true. You can implement "hooks" on top of a class based components. It's essentially the strategy pattern.
React is built on components which are objects (both in a programming and GUI sense). Using OOP to describe them just makes so much more sense to me.
If you have that functionality in a class component, and want to share it with a new link component, then the React Class way is to create a "withHover" HOC and wrap your link component in it. withHover(LinkComponent) which will have the necessary variables and pass them as props to your LinkComponent which is "okay".
But what if you have like 5 of these little hooks? Your LinkComponent now needs to be wrapped in each (or them all wrapped into a single HOC) and has to accept the props for all of them. Or, if you're extending classes as you describe you now have class LinkComponent extends HoverClass, ClickClass, DataClass etc...
With functional components you have something like a "useHover" hook. It passes back the hover state and the "onMouseEnter" and "onMouseLeave" callbacks necessary for your link within the functional component itself. It doesn't have to expose props to it's HOC, so it's now self contained.
It seems the philosophy of react is to have a lot of "littler" discreet pieces of code be they components or hooks and not have to have a ton of dependencies between them. You tend to get better tests this way as well as it should make it easier for other devs as they don't have to know the whole system and can work on a more discreet bit.
I, personally, use function components pretty much exclusively these days. If the function gets too big with hooks I tend to just create a single hook from them, not because it's going to be shared but just to keep my code more manageable, the hooks create props and the components consume them.
To each their own. I don't seem to be frustrated by the problems many in this thread and the article share.
No, I'm not kidding.
Unless something's fundamentally changed about the code since release, they even end up attached to an object representing the UI component, by the time the heart of React's runtime code considers them. It's some real Rube-Goldberg shit. I read the code because I read the announcement docs and was like "wait, it looks like they... but no, surely they didn't" but yeah, turns out, they did.
When pressed about it, be ready to be hit with, "You don't understand hooks".
I've used class components and I think hooks are much better than the monstrosity that the lifecycle methods would usually become.
Also defining functions inside other functions is very much the staple of functional programming.
Isn't the difference that JavaScript runtimes don't compile them away unlike functional runtimes?
function johnson() { johnson.state = {}; }
This is however shared state and the state will be reset whenever the function is called a second time. So what you normally do with a function is to pass the state via arguments and now the same function can work with different states. React could totally do this via props or as a second argument.
function Johnson(props, state) {}
Instead they changed the laws of functions so that a function can act different the first time it is called and also be called the first time multiple times if and when the function calls a functions that looks like JavaScript but follow different rules [1].
This is weird.
[1] https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-rules.html#only-call-hooks-at...
But here's the weirdness. useState knows whether it's already been called for a given component; this is how it tracks state. The first call returns the state (the initial value) and a setter. Subsequent calls -- occurring after the first render -- do not return these objects anew, but instead reach into a per-functional-component store and return the values that already exist there. Calling the setter doesn't set the state in the body; rather, it updates the value in the store, then triggers a re-render.
If you're wondering just how react knows how to match up calls to useState between renders, it doesn't really. It simply matches them up based on the order they're called in. For that reason, you have to always call exactly the same useState calls on each render -- no putting some in an if statement or a variable length for loop, otherwise they'll be out of sync.
There are a bunch of other "hooks" for use in functional components, but they all work basically the same way: place some data in the functional component's store, then set up re-render (which, again, just means calling the component's function again) to occur when certain data changes.
I've used React a lot, but only via Reagent in ClojureScript.
I think the JS people are being scammed.
Before at least I knew what was called on boostrap moments. Now everything is run as a side effect when any dependency change. My needs on checking if a prop or a dependency has changed hasn't evolved at all. I just have the core of my side effects on useEffect.
In fairness, the JS world has never had well engineered OOP GUI toolkits like you find in the desktop space. If you've never used JavaFX then ReactJS probably seems pretty magical. If you have, then, well ...
ClojureScript is a functional language.
Reagent is a ClojureScript wrapper over React.
Cljs + Reagent is AWESOME.
There is a JavaFX wrapper too, with a similar API.
The comment was in response to "that's bonkers". And that has been my reaction on learning stuff like React and derived frameworks. A lot of it looks like functions for the sake of it, when objects already solve those problems but became unfashionable.
There’s not much of a cognitive difference between “defining a reagent component which uses ratoms and calls a pure function that derefs, updates or swaps them”, and “defining a react functional component that uses hooks”. It looks weird to have the “atoms” inside the render function instead of outside, and there are the aforementioned limitations (“the rules of hooks”), but it’s a compromise to get the feature into JS React in a consistent, performant manner.
I’d love to use CLJS/Reagent or even go full re-frame on our front-end codebase, but that’s a hard sell at my company since I’m the only dev who’s ever played with Clojure.
Class components just have more lines, more boilerplate, so they have a higher cognitive load. But when you have state, you have more complexity, you can't just wave your hand wave and make it go away. You need to take the complexity into account.
Hooks are trying to do hand waving. The thing is, once you get to non-trivial use cases, the handwaving stops working. You're better off thinking a lot about where you state lives in your component hierarchy, and then limit your state to where you really need it. Once you do that the overhead of class components doesn't really make that big a deal.
The same principle applies to almost everything in programming, the more thought you put into structure, the simpler you can make everything.
Class components were/are just fine.
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Sort of how AWS keeps mucking with Lambdas so that thier customers can keep doing it wrong and paying too much.
Or how doctors just give patients scips if they ask about a drug and it won't incur them any liability.
Over and over I have seen the world shout the praises of a new paradigm that solves a problem...except they totally misunderstand the concept and run in an unintended direction. No one can fight that momentum. So they don't. It happens with nearly everything in tech.
Then, for their next big major release, the big feature was adding configuration to make it even more powerful!
I haven't used them in a while so my memory might be hazy, but this is exactly the phenomenon you've described. I wonder if it's insecurity or trying to please the crowd that simple niche tools in the frontend end up being configurability behemoths. There's always a time in a JS library where someone decides to rewrite the whole thing and add plugin support, and that's the time that library goes to shit.
Over long enough time you get Webpack, with more knobs than the Linux kernel, and cycles back to a version that tries to be smart and not require any configuration anymore, like 1.0 did.
I'd have to re-evaluate the current Android landscape because it's been a while, but I might still consider React Native only for that platform, because having RN smooth the rough edges off Android dev made it a lot more pleasant and quick, with far less time lost fighting the platform and working around/replacing bad 1st party stuff piecemeal. But maybe it's gotten better-enough in the last 4ish years that it's no longer tempting to drag in RN just to avoid native Android dev.
In general though, I just no longer default to advocating React for highly-interactive sites or "webapps", as I did for a while.
Ultimately hooks are probably the way they are for the same reason Redux is the way it was(pre RTK I suppose)..
It's also a bit funny that certain kinds of people can just brush off these things with some non-sequitur on a message board when there are almost always bigger things at play.
Per https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-intro.html , the primary motivations were:
- "It’s hard to reuse stateful logic between components "
- "Complex components become hard to understand"
- "Classes confuse both people and machines" (remembering how `this` works, code minification, method binding, etc)
There's also an excellent "Why React Hooks?" post at https://ui.dev/why-react-hooks that gives background details.
Additionally, the React team has talked about how hooks and function components allow them to have "forks" of the component tree in various states of partial completion at a time, for use with Suspense and transition features. This works because closures capture data in a scope, whereas mutable class instances could have gotten changed and refer to a single `this` instance.
Hooks are better than HOCs, no this is better than managing this, and dependency arrays are better than if (this.props.fooBarBaz !== newProps.fooBarBaz || this.props.onFooBarBazChanged !== newProps.onFooBarBazChanged || …)
So `this.state` is hard to optimize?
> Hooks had nothing to do with v8 optimizations or `this.state`.
Huh? That's what you just said. The spec makes it hard to optimize. The JIT compiler can't infer enough about the shape of the data.
It's not about "optimization" in the sense of "how fast can the v8 interpreter execute lookups on the class instance" or anything like that.
It's about "when this function executes, what data does it see, and did any of those values get changed out from under it in a way that could potentially break the logic"?
You're just describing the semantics of functions versus classes, and the consideration has existed long before hooks came around for exactly the reasons you describe. This discussion has also existed long before JavaScript, React, or hooks existed obviously. It's secondary to the discussion because function components have existed for a long time.
None of what you're saying changes the fact that replacing classes and lifecycles with hooks was done despite the fact that 99.9% of the API users would never care about the performance implications of classes, while that is precisely why the React team made the change. JavaScript is plenty composable with classes and without nested useEffect calls, which is one of the most absurd foot gun APIs that I have seen released in my entire career.
I'm pretty deeply tied into the React ecosystem, and I honestly can't remember _ever_ seeing that mentioned as a justification.
If you can link me a reference with them saying that, I'd both be interested in reading it, but honestly surprised to see that stated at all.
God it drives me nuts that the language will allow you to spread a class into an object and it will take the properties but not the methods.
[0]https://raganwald.com/2016/07/20/prefer-composition-to-inher...
More importantly, I realized React is trying to tame Facebook level of problems and hence their design decision steams from those data points. I develop small/medium type of frontend apps which doesn't need to apply solutions developed for such a scale.
These days I'm using Hotwire[1] (Turbo + Stimulus) with fair amount of vanilla javascript libraries in my apps. Occasionally, when I need to develop a reactive piece of UI I reach out for Svelte[2]
I'm quite happy after making the move. My apps complexity has reduced drastically and there is huge boost in my overall productivity.
[1] https://hotwired.dev
[2] https://svelte.dev
This has the advantage that when - inevitably - tool1 gets deprecated and tool2 arrives you'll have someone that can adapt and learn, and likely you'll also have someone who can teach.
The worst experience so far was for a general full stack role. They sent me a 3 page long PDF of job "requirements" which was a lot of fluff and implicit stuff. I get it... but I think that can be reserved for later. Not the best offer, seemed like they were disorganized in general, etc.
The best experience was for the best TC offer _and_ most relevant position for me... they sent over half a page that didn't waste a single character. Named a few frameworks but they had a crystal clear idea of what they needed. It was amazing, lol.
Strong agreement!
There's a saying in community organizing and activist circles that goes something like:
"Don't apply the solutions of the butterfly to the problems of the caterpillar."
Imho it's a really important consideration when thinking about scale of movements (and nonprofits... and any community initiative...). This is especially true when "professional" people are always coming in and confidently over-applying their learnings in corporations to thinking about activism (which often, though not always, has very different incentive structures and lifecycles).
I think about this parable often in regards how all these scaled tech companies end up stewarding the developer tools and therefore practices for everyone. And they tend to out-pace and out-broadcast other wonderful tools that could better serve the majority of developer niches.
In 5 years if no one else is using Hotwire then your code is obsolete, no?
I liked working in next.js in the past but my company was already talking about Nuxt.js when we hadnt even fully converted to next. Feels like jumping ships from a ship with some major flaws, but will continue to float for x+ years, onto a lifeboat that may or may not make it another 500 feet before sinking.
I think that's the opposite of what he is saying. Because React is updated and changes frequently, your code becomes obsolete unless you update to follow the latest changes. In theory, if everyone abandoned Hotwire, your code would never be obsolete or need changes, because Hotwire would never change. In reality, as browsers and web standards change, frameworks need updating.
That would be a bad thing if it meant that earlier best practices were no longer maintained. But that’s not true. Class components are still around. All official documentation continues to have class component examples and explanations (where it makes sense obviously…there isn’t any class component documentation under hooks, of course). And class components will likely still be around 5 years from now.
Step 2: Someone gets fed up with this writes a framework that "does things right" and is designed for "simplicity"
Step 3: People start loving the new tool because it is so much easier to work with.
Step 4: People start to do things the tool wasn't designed to do. They start making "minor feature enhancements" to the tool so that it can fit more use cases.
Alternative Step 4: Tool becomes "industry standard" so everyone starts using it because it is "the right way", regardless of whether or not it is a good fit.
Step 5: The new tool becomes massive and bloated and overwhelmed with too many features, configurations, and options.
Step 6: Return to step 1.
> The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Web 2.0 Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the great mountainous island of FANNG. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”
For people like me who are new to JS and use these sorts of discussion to determine which technologies I should adopt first, it's really just pointless noise in the channel.
The little I know about JS so far, I definitely know this joke is tired and played out.
Step 2: Get a better joke please?
If you define yourself by the technology you work with you aren't an engineer you're a technician.
Essentially, all these frameworks ARE part of a cycle that repeat, and in time we all start to see it. Most of them just iterate on previous concepts, with some core concepts going way back to the late 60s, 70s and 80s.
What remains the same is the underlying Javascript language itself, and more importantly, fundamental software engineering and computer science principles.
Learn the fundamentals, and they will help you learn every new framework and language more easily, and in more depth.
If you really just want to get a job using JavaScript, then you might be best off browsing job postings to see what kinds of companies are hiring for which frameworks, and go from there.
But if your goal is literally to learn JS and find the right tech stack for you, unfortunately there is no replacement for learning the basics, and then picking a framework that looks interesting, and building something in it to see if it clicks with you.
It is almost as if people are not breaking their problems over the correct dimensions.
I have been doing Rails development for past 10 years now and I never faced a dilemma where the framework took a direction which isn't aligned with its core vision.
I have been just trying to find a similar tool for frontend where I don't have to keep rewriting the entire codebase.
As a result, Django left its users completely on their own, while Rails made choices that wouldn't last the test of time.
Given how chaotic the frontend ecosystems have been over the past decade, I'm not sure there was a "right" answer in hindsight.
I've never seen this before, but I'm stealing it!
Did you rewrite your entire app?
I never used Svelte, but I feel that "develop a reactive piece of UI" is basically Stimulus' job description. Can you explain a scenario/task where Stimulus does so poorly, that you flip the switch and use Svelte instead?
That said, learning how useEffect replaces lifecycle methods is pretty quick to pickup. As is useState.
The lesser known hooks are what are difficult for me to understand. useRef is pretty clear. useMemo? I'm not quite sure what it's for, but I imagine it's not too tough to figure out if I spend a bit of time learning & experimenting with it.
So, although I liked the simplicity of class components, functional ones aren't too bad. They bring in some additional complications, but with a bit of effort it seems to all be learnable to me.
It’s challenging though to keep supporting an API contract that you don’t believe in anymore. Or especially that you are causing you and others pain. I think sometimes maybe the thing to do is pass the baton and work on something else, but we also punish people for abandoning things. Like the author of Groovy, who hopped around from project to project and lost people.
Changing the core methodology of a project used by millions of developers at the time was extremely irresponsible. They basically made obsolete all React educational resources overnight. I'm sure people making money by producing React educational content were very happy about that though.
I'm currently working on a project with hundreds of reactive components shown at any given time (very extensive financial analytics/modeling collected from over 500 data sources and real-time updated). Async rendering is a godsend. Perhaps React isn't for you if you don't see the need.
https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...
What remains is React, Angular and Vue - and out of these React wins by a huge margin, also thanks to async rendering.
I'm looking forward having another look at the remaining libs in a few years.
Hooks just match the way the React runtime works. Classes are just way easier to do weird bad stuff with. I’m not sure I would ever choose React if it was still class based. I’d use Ember probably which gives you more with the class-oriented API. Without the simplified control flow of hooks, I don’t see what React even offers over Ember or Vue.
Has anyone branched that into its own thing yet?
Hooks have always seemed so weird. And turns out it's the same for many others.
1. Self's prototypes support multiple delegation while JS objects only have one prototype (can be fixed with Proxies).
2. Javascript objects lack a universal clone method.
3. Self is entirely message based, while JS is property based.
Sure methods like componentDidMount are a mouthful but I found it much more explicit
That said, the hooks model is far from perfect. They give you a lot of rope to hang yourself with and were badly introduced. Within weeks the internet was ablaze with terrible advice.
When so many people get it wrong, the library is to blame. And I wish hooks were as robust as Solid.js’ signals model.
Vue 3 also has hook now. But none of these defects in the article exist.
In vue.
To use some value in a effect, you just use it and it is tracked.
If you need to clear up your code. You cut some code into a useXxx function, and your reusable utility is done. You can use it everywhere now. You don't really need to specify dependency of whatever by yourself.
If you must manipulate a dom, you just manipulate it. It will work as long as you revert the change before vue want to update it again.(And vue do provide a hook for you to attach a handler when these happen)
These restrictions are added by the way react implements hook, but not hook themselves. Hooks are just more user friendly services (by allow the hook to attach to component instance without all the glue codes(addListener or whatever))
I’m even more impressed with the extended Vue ecosystem like Vite, Vitest.
For example. To make a mutex to prevent duplicate submit of form. You use need to declare a instance field and wraps the code that do the submit. That alone is 3 lines of code but don't even include error handling.
But now I sealed it into a one line hook
And then the submit can't run in parallel now.Recently worked on migrating a large codebase over from a legacy solution to Vue 3 with composition API, it was a pretty enjoyable experience, especially with Pinia!
Though I'd say that the problem was that most component libraries/frameworks out there actually don't support Vue 3 well enough. Last I checked, only the following were viable with Vue 3:
Most of the other ones considered weren't quite there yet: I mean, is it really so hard to get a bunch of pre-built components for Vue 3 with Bootstrap, or Bulma? It feels a bit like the Python 2 to Python 3 migration in some respects.From what I recall, quasar managed to update very quickly.
Vuetify is currently in Beta for Vue 3 as they went with a greenfield rewrite to deal with tech debt. I rolled it out to a production site recently and it works well.
BootstrapVue completely dropped the ball, despite the corporate sponsorships the original maintainers went missing for a whole year & bailed. It got new maintainers at the start of the year, but they've been delayed by current geopolitical events.
This is true, at least there now is Vue 3 support, just checked: https://quasar.dev/
Though I can't edit the original post anymore. Oh well, thanks for clearing that up.
Someone actually did in a project once and that lead to render loops that were hard to debug or solve: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/modern-reac...
Instead of a clear message about what caused that loop and maybe a walkthrough of the last N iterations (which changes caused which logic to be triggered), the error message was just a vague and lazy error (even AngularJS errors were better back in the day, filling in details in the docs as URL parameters).
Then again, over the years I've formed the opinion that both approaches are bad, just in different ways. There is no silver bullet, just look at how even desktop software and UI solutions struggled to be workable throughout the decades, of course things won't be that much better in regards to front end.
However, Vue's approach to hooks seems refreshing: creating and nesting components still isn't as easy as in React, but getting things done feels a little bit less cryptic and not as confusing, especially with something like Pinia!
I also think the fear of verbosity in this post is why I can't take it too seriously. Solo maintaining a not-so-old Expo application which uses React Navigation, I constantly have to rewrite large sections of code due to constant refactorings to match whatever coding style is hot at the moment, as the 6 month deprecation deadline is constantly at my doorstep because I have bigger fish on my plate. SO answers being out of date isn't a problem because React is too old, it's a problem because of everyone wanting it to be shiny and new again, and React acquiescing to those demands.
The author does have a bit of a point with libraries, but I counter with Nessim Btesh's fantastic article regarding proper React style[^1]. In short, you shouldn't really be depending on libraries for production needs, just for prototyping.
[^1]: https://nesbtesh.medium.com/how-i-write-react-after-8-years-...
The arguments I’ve heard is that it is “cleaner”, “more understandable” or the OO style is preferred. Some developers feel uncomfortable with hook magic because it introduces a more niche programming concept than OO (e.g stateful functions). I don’t find these arguments compelling. What the React team managed to do was reproduce the same functionality as class components while decreasing the footguns associated with them.
1. https://reactjs.org/blog/2016/07/13/mixins-considered-harmfu...
2. https://youtu.be/dpw9EHDh2bM
3. https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-intro.html#motivation
I disliked hooks after first trying them on their release, and I hate them now.
I'm still bitter that a senior engineer didn't step in and prevent them from destroying the react ecosystem. I wonder if they were have been squashed if React was developed outside Facebook?