Does Anybody Actually Like React?(jsx.lol) |
Does Anybody Actually Like React?(jsx.lol) |
Later I've a managed state, cause let's agree, it's pretty convenient to have UI updated after a change in the state.
(Purely based on vibes, I do not have anything robust to back this up.)
I like ELM because the core is extremely small. You just have to remember the model, the update function and the message type. That is it.
React on the other hand makes you remember a million conventions and patterns and api like useEffect, useState, hooks.
I made sure that all of the interactions in our app that don't require a server round-trip are instant, without any annoying undead skeletons and animations. This works really well because we keep most of the data in RAM on the client, with IndexDB as the backing store and a custom synchronization protocol.
I avoided the "server-side rendering" out of a general distrust of "magic" solutions that do everything for you.
React itself is also really straightforward as a mental model of rendering.
AI writes React well too
State library is prob all you need now.
Here is a fun thing.
Write a bunch of JSON. A lot. Now write a lot of JSX. Then convert the JSON to JSX. Then convert the JSX to JSON. I was surprised by how much easier it was for me to reason in JSX. I use threejs and react three fiber (r3f). Again the JSX type of representation easily wins out for me. I don't really understand why. Maybe JSX ends up being more pictorial - as in a picture is worth a thousand words?
So I'm not sure I even care of about React. I just reason better with JSX than with all the other crufty things (template, html, htmx, etc). And yes, find all of them including React crufty.
It also doesn't help that every single react codebase will always be drastically different from one another. In fact the easiest way to know the date of a react project are the dependencies one chooses in package.json. IDK if that's good or bad, but when you see bootstrap + sass in ${current_year} it's not going to be a good time. Compare this to something like Go where most projects are quite similar. Never had issues jumping in completely new Go repos but react projects are always a massive gamble toward always sucking.
No solutions from me, I charge a premium working on react and there is no shortage of clients with garbage react projects needing help but can't imagine the waste of pure human effort put into maintaining such projects to begin with.
(1) The extreme boom of software engineering as a "get rich quick" career over the past 15 years, and it being the "default" framework for doing stuff on the web. It's so bad, in fact, that most developers these days don't even really understand the difference between a backend and a front-end. I've had to explain, from first principles, how cookies work. All these very important details are simplified or straight up buried by React and its ecosystem.
(2) The overall groupthink of engineers: a lot of us will weirdly become fixated on some framework, operating system, programming language and turn into absolute zealots. This has a long and storied history (Linux vs Windows, C++ vs Java, and so on, so it's nothing new). React just happened to capture a lot of the zeitgeist even though it was objectively the wrong tool to use for like 90% of use cases.
(3) Terrible alternatives. I mostly blame the W3C for this, as JQuery helpers (selectors, AJAX/websockets, etc.) should've been inducted in the DOM standard much earlier and because the W3C (and by extention, the ECMAscript committee) is essentially a beaureaucratic battleground for big tech[1], it's painfully slow to get anything passed, standards are all over the place, and everyone tries to push their own agenda (Google wants to track you, Facebook wants social stuff, Apple wants secure payments via fingerprints, etc.)
(4) The startup boom of the last 15 years or so. This has always been a bit of a problem, but a common trope has been (and still very much is): if it's good enough for "huge tech company," it's good enough for us. So you've had a ton of startups that have been built from the ground up on React and the sunken cost has always been too much to switch.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/software/2018/04/13/go-away-kid-...
One of the things that was clunky in the React version was the use of setInterval. I had to write a hook in React and it just added this unnecessary layer of weirdness in how it all interacts[1]. In the Lit version, I just use setInterval normally and there's nothing extra to understand.
[1] https://overreacted.io/making-setinterval-declarative-with-r...
But the thing is, React and others is useful only for a few specific cases, IMO. I would only feel the need for them if we're building truly interactive applications (Open Street Map, figma, a text editor,...), but only because they've taken care of the state management boilerplate (even if you're now boxed by their applications. But most apps on the web don't needs to be an SPA. They can actually be improved by being a multi page application with small islands of interactivity.
Then Svelte 5 came along and made Svelte more like React. At first, there were just a few simple runes, but then the runes started proliferating like crazy to solve other runes' problems. At that point, Svelte was dead to me and I went back to React/Next.
The right path for Svelte to take would have been to continue to refine Svelte 4.
I don't want to be a "you should've double bagged it" guy, I'm just curious. Svelte is not the be all and all, if you moved on to greener pastures more power to you.
React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried.
I'd take React over the Angular 1 days any time. I'd take Angular 1's full-bodied MVC over the "build it yourself from scratch every time" approach of Backbone. I'd take Backbone's minimal MVC structure over the classic JQuery Soup architecture. And I'd take JQuery's dom manipulations and standard-library improvements over the native apis (of that era) in an instant.
React has its tradeoffs, but we got here after a long slog of other things that don't work.
The real discussion would be between React's vdom and something like Solid's signals.
Before that was XMLHttpRequest (particularly during my .Net WebForm days) and even had to use the ActiveXObject in IE that predated JSON.
A lot of people did and do like that idea — I like it too — but it’s woefully inadequate for making rich web apps that a team of average devs can handle.
jQuery isn’t a “framework” either, at least not like Angular or Vue, though it can be extended with “plugins.”
Both jQuery and React are foundational technologies, so comparison is valid.
Both jQuery and React are foundational technologies, and comparison is valid.
These days I use web components for component writing and frameworks to handle routing, state management, bundling, and so on.
> React has its tradeoffs, but we got here after a long slog of other things that don't work.
I strongly believe it's because of trying to achieve the wrong goal with the wrong tool. So many websites could just be bare html pages and forms with just a sprinkle of JS for some interactivity, but they want to add JS for whatever reason.
If you can have a complete repo browser without JS (cgit), most web applications can survive without it too.
First is the pursuit of polish. Each extra 1% in polish adds tons and tons of lines of code. If you want that level of polish on a non-SPA, you'll still have to add all that code then reload it one page at a time. I see a lot of these "bare HTML pages" and they are lacking important stuff like i18n/a11y/WCAG compliance. Try adding all that back in and you'll see your website bloat right up.
Second is bloated do-everything libraries. Ant, MUI, Mantine, or whatever else is aimed to be a superset of all possible website needs which means that the components you adopt have tons of features and bloat you don't need that slow down loading, parsing, and execution. Simply replacing that <Paper> component with a <div> and a few lines of CSS will get you the same thing you want, but will save you layers of unnecessary React components and sometimes a layer or two of unneeded DOM nodes as well that were added because the <Paper> component had weird interactions with some other component.
Third is manpower/experience. Many/most JS devs today (sad to say) don't actually know how to make that simple <Paper> component on their own. Those that do often skip it because they've got too much to do already. I've lost count of the number of teams I've seen where a bog-standard backend has 25 people working on stuff while the frontend team has 3x as many total lines of code (which are often times handling human-computer interaction issues the backend couldn't even imagin), but only 3-4 people to maintain it all.
Fourth is of course management. Designs on the backend change at a trickle while changes to the frontend arrive in a torrent. Understaffed frontend teams can't keep up with all the things shoved on their plate, so they usually can't optimize things even if they know how (eg, only a small percentage of SPA actually know/take the time to lazy load various parts of their apps to improve load time).
Fix these things and the SPA performance will improve drastically and almost certainly exceed BE templates with some jQuery spaghetti.
Plus the ecosystem. It's huge. Nothing comes closer.
It also uses JSX, but since there's no virtual DOM, you can also write 100% JS, but, unlike React, you can do it without any special wrapper. So you don't need to use or write a `react-dnd`, just use any vanilla drag and drop library.
How did the React community convince so many people of this falsehood? Do that many people just not know what javascript is? It baffles me that one could look at JSX and be like, “that right there is vanilla javascript”.
I wanted to make a back button use browser APIs to go back if the coming from the inbox, just link to the inbox otherwise to preserve scrolling. I had to wire the actions from the html to call the function that goes back, then in my controller determine the previous page and send the JS enabled back button or the hard link. My logic was spread out over 3 files!
With React I can have js in a component determine if the previous page was inbox, and based on that value show the back button JSX or the link. ALL IN ONE FILE. One conceptually entity for me to model vs 3 that do other things and this functionally is hammered in.
Is it slower? Definitely. But it makes me happy. Miserable in a corporate React slopbase? Blame your coworkers, it would definitely be worse without it.
This is why I hate react spas. They're always trying to find some stupid way to break my browsers back button and navigation buttons.
I will always prefer htmx/server rendering with native everything (except the occasional form boosting.)
It is also somewhat ironic that until late 2010s a common complaint about web development is how fast it changes and how many new things are coming up all the times. It was a very valid complaint, of course. But then when the React monoculture rose to the top, and everyone decides to complain about how that sucks instead. You really can't win.
React wins because it has become a default choice and folks like what’s comfortable to their preferences
HTML, CSS and a scripting language inly for progressive enhancement are such beautiful, pure ideas, and learning frontend at the height of the web standards movement made me a partisan of using these technologies as intended. But these days, doing it that way feels like building a house with Japanese joinery techniques.
You love JSX, you don't love React
I have heard a little about ClojureScript here and there. Will take a look at it when I am free!
Currently I'm using hono/jsx, mostly on the server, which seems like an even simpler way to do it than Preact. The JSX looks pretty much the same.
1. JS supports JSX literals so
let elDef = <div id="some">Text</div>;
let elDef = ["div", {id:"some"}, ["Text"]];
element.append(elDef); // same thing as element.append("<div id=some>Text</div>");
element.prepend(elDef); // ditto
element.patch(elDef); // patch element's DOM by elDef
4. Add render() support. A method that generates tree of elDef's. It gets called by append(),prepend() and patch().
And we will get native React implementation. This will be quite useful and allowed to marry React alike approach with WebComponents into single mechanism.
1...4 is how it is implemented in my Sciter as the Reactor thing, see: https://docs.sciter.com/docs/Reactor/
I personally like JSX quite a lot. Solid.js is a framework which uses JSX but drops the virtual DOM. Its creator has a course 'Reactivity with SolidJS' on Frontend masters. He's a compiler enthusiast and tells you quite a bit about how much he had to learn from the React project, which, to me, it put into perspective the kind of thinking React brought to frontend. I won't code in React myself, but I surely appreciate its massive influence on everything else.
But now I just use it to get paid cause it's the standard and I know it well. In my experience keeping a large React codebase simple requires some skills that are clearly not universal.
If I have the choice I use Svelte because reactivity is much easier with it and it includes most of what I need to focus on building things.
For me, coding is feeling intuitive as a human being even when I am writing code for the computers (but also for other human beings who'll read and work on my code; not sure how much would that be post-LLM world but still...). React never felt intuitive or, say, natural to me. It "feels" upside down to me, a bit anachronistic (in some way). But as I have seen with many frameworks, or rather "paradigms", which become fashion in the end, "the tools in vogue" because that's what the largest population of coders use, this is what one usually has to use now. I was quite sad when I saw Jetpack Compose as an Android dev. Technically it had improvements over the XMLs no doubt but then seeing it was React was quite not great (at least not for me). But this is what it and one just deals with.
I wish the coding world wasn't obsessed with patterns, architectures, and the need to fit everything into something concretely established (or in vogue). I often see Frankensteins as results.
It didn't click until I saw a react+graphql project, and it makes sense why meta created react and graphql
Maybe nowadays there is a set of popular libraries for react so it becomes framework-y?
A framework expects most of your project to be shoehorned into it.
Whether something is one or the other depends on which of the two most users are doing. It's not a very interesting argument, though, because debating semantics is the worst use of the limited time you have on this planet.
Web components are the next big idea. I hope they have a chance to work.
You hate BAD react SPAs that break the fundamentals of how the web works. Good ones take care to not do that.
React fundamentally doesn't cause this issue either. You can use a different framework than react or even vanilla JS and still produce the same bugs.
The recommended htmx way would be to hook up an onclick button to inline js or if you dislike that, a function called goBackOrInbox. It can then be something like:
function goBackOrInbox() { if (document.referrer) { const path = new URL(document.referrer).pathname; if (path.startsWith('/inbox')) { history.back(); return; } } window.location.href = '/inbox'; }
And if you use that pattern a lot then you can parameterise the function with whatever the route should be.
But that’s all of them? If Github, Reddit, LinkedIn and Facebook and others are unable to build SPAs that don’t constantly break the fundamentals while also choking the browser, maybe it is a tech problem.
having lots of JavaScript tends to make more WCAG problems, because you do interactive stuff that needs to be described. Having bare HTML and the accessibility that is required for that is not tending to bloat in my experience.
It does have its own templating syntax, which is trivial to learn. No more cumbersome to learn than JSX, which is a templating language designed by the React team. Not sure why you chose to make the distinction between JSX and Vue’s DSL as if JSX wasn’t developed for the sole purpose of facilitating React’s virtual DOM.
Vue templates mean learning Vue's custom syntax for if statements, loops, dynamic attribute syntax (with its own gotcha), binding dot modifiers, data binding, and whatever else. It requires learning its entire custom directive system. It uses custom syntax for stuff like events too.
I don't see this as remotely comparable with Vue being much closer to something like my time working with Angular 1 (a time I'd rather not repeat).