Ask HN: When will the React trend fade away? I'm surely not an expert coder, but I've work with the web since setting up BBS in the 90s. I've dabbled in react a few time only to find myself annoyed by it's complexity. I have a deep feeling that this type of framework is only a trend. It is changing the way we think about the web, and will surely inspire better way to code the web, but I feel the fad greatly surpass the usefulness of this new paradigm. I wonder how HN feels about it? |
First, React has spread the concept of composable component-based UI development. Angular has adopted many of the ideas, Ember has adopted many of the ideas, and there's a whole bunch of other libraries that have been inspired by ideas that React has helped popularize.
Second, React's popularity is continuing to grow. I'm pretty biased, but I don't see React as a "fad", and I definitely don't see it going away any time soon.
Third, the point of React itself is to _reduce_ complexity so that you can look at components in isolation and understand how they behave. Yes, yes, "Javascript Fatigue", tooling, libraries, etc, etc. Most of that is not React-specific, but rather a factor of trying to build complex web applications that live in a browser.
If you have any specific concerns or complaints about learning or using React, I'd be happy to answer questions. Just for kicks, I'll toss out my standard advice for learning React:
The article "A Study Plan to Cure Javascript Fatigue" ( https://medium.freecodecamp.com/a-study-plan-to-cure-javascr... ) is a great place to start. It gives an excellent series of steps for tackling modern Javascript concepts one piece at a time: Javascript, React, ES6, and state management.
On that note, definitely don't over-complicate the learning process by trying to learn many different things at once. Some people will say you should use a "boilerplate" to learn React, and they're wrong - boilerplate projects almost always come with too many pieces configured, and are confusing for beginners.
Instead, the best advice is to focus on learning React itself first. Once you have a good understanding of how React works, you will better appreciate why a state management library like Redux can be useful, and you can learn about other tools later.
You should start out by reading through the official React docs and tutorial at https://facebook.github.io/react/, and I'd encourage you to use the official Create-React-App tool ( https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app ) for setting up projects. It creates a project with a solid build setup, with no configuration needed on your part. There's an excellent post called "Simple React Development in 2017" ( https://hackernoon.com/simple-react-development-in-2017-113b... ) that gives some more specific instructions on the actual steps to follow.
Past that, I keep a big list of links to high-quality tutorials and articles on React, Redux, and related topics, at https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links . Specifically intended to be a great starting point for anyone trying to learn the ecosystem, as well as a solid source of good info on more advanced topics. It includes links for learning core Javascript (ES5), modern Javascript (ES6+), React, and much more. I also published an "Intro to React (and Redux)" presentation at http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/02/presentation-react-... , which is a good overview of the basic concepts for both React and Redux.
Finally, the Reactiflux chat channels on Discord are a great place to hang out, ask questions, and learn. The invite link is at https://www.reactiflux.com .