alt Hacker NewsI don't touch frontend very often anymore, but you could see the writing on the wall for complexity when React took over and newer devs were working exclusively in that abstraction.
Unlike other abstractions where things get tidied up and more simple, React is much more complex than the technology it's building on. Necessarily, to enable it's features, but none the less it is a consequence of this that when all someone knows is React or other frameworks, things get overengineered. They didn't realise it could be so much simpler if they just knocked it back a layer instead of climbing higher and higher.
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I don't think this is specifically a react problem. The problem is that people don't want to learn what modern CSS can do, or write it themselves (see Tailwind), and most new frameworks make it easy to just sidestep that with div soup.
Some of us _like_ CSS, and try to use as much of it when possible, but I feel like we are few and far between. I use react to manage the state of my app, but that doesn't mean I have to make a 27 div component to style an input.
The big problem is trying to convince the rest of the team that they should learn and use CSS.
You make a good point. From a philosophical point of view, abstractions should hide complexity and make things easier for the human user. It should be like a pyramid: the bottom layer should be the most complex, and each subsequent layer should be simpler. The problem is that many of today's abstractions are built on past technology, which was often much better designed and simpler due to the constraints of that time. Due to the divergent complexity of today's abstractions and unavoidable leaks, we have a plethora of "modern" frameworks and tools that are difficult to use and create mental strain for developers. In short, I always avoid using such frameworks and prefer the old, boring basics wherever possible.
It was fine when it started, it's the addition of useEffect and hooks that messed everything up. Although normaly I prefer functional, for react classes were 100 times better
Is this the same with everything? In the past, a hard drive, a mouse, or a web camera was a dumb piece of hardware and a driver that ran on your PC. Now, IIUC, each of those has it's own computer (SoC) running an entire OS. Your phone probably has ~20+ SoC. One for USB, one for Wifi, One for Bluetooth, one for each of the 4 cameras, one for lidar, one for SSD, one for cellular, one for the secure enclave, one for audio, Each of them is an entire computer, more powerful than most 1980s general purpose computers, running an entire OS with multiple abstractions internally and all of that to make that device appear as yet another abstraction.
Am I wrong?
Managing state and syncing it to the DOM manually is much harder than React (or any other big framework) for any non-trivial web app. Reactive, inherently asynchronous, event driven applications get complex easily.
The problem is app-document impedence mismatch. CSS makes stuff easier but for doc-like pages. In addition doc-like pages want some app-like niceness too.
If you need to be an app you usually need a framework to stay sane (evidence: most other native UI kits are frameworks of some sort) and thus React etc. But they want full contol. Thus 2 ways to do a radio etc.
Worse still is the misunderstanding that React is simple. It’s an endless stream of cache invalidation bugs. Linters are getting better at catching these. But they also have false positives.
> when all someone knows is React or other frameworks, things get overengineered
The next level annoyance is that everybody just assumes React to be the default for everything.
Check the Shadcn website. The landing page doesn’t mention that this is a React-only UI library at all. Same with Radix. The marketing sounds like a general-purpose UI lib. You gotta dig around a bit to realize that this is React-only.