alt Hacker NewsAs someone who lived through all major waves of JS for the last ~16 years, I do love react, in a sense:
React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried.
I'd take React over the Angular 1 days any time. I'd take Angular 1's full-bodied MVC over the "build it yourself from scratch every time" approach of Backbone. I'd take Backbone's minimal MVC structure over the classic JQuery Soup architecture. And I'd take JQuery's dom manipulations and standard-library improvements over the native apis (of that era) in an instant.
React has its tradeoffs, but we got here after a long slog of other things that don't work.
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But why over vue? My biggest frustration has been how vue ends up moving in the direction of react. The original component architecture with the html template, JavaScript state and css styles in vue was so nice. Even the data fetching a url in the component was so intuitive.
React was a major improvement over Backbone + Marionette. Pre-jQuery was a shit-show as they hadn't even standardised the DOM.
Before that was XMLHttpRequest (particularly during my .Net WebForm days) and even had to use the ActiveXObject in IE that predated JSON.
That’s right — the outcome is path-dependent. If we knew then what we know now, surely we’d have gotten over the idea that the web is DOM-documents-plus-REST-plus-JS-handlers-everywhere.
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.
Wait, react is a framework now? People used to say that react is just a model binding library. FYI I haven't used react.
Chesterton’s framework.
> React is the worst JS framework except for all the others we've tried.
> React has its tradeoffs, but we got here after a long slog of other things that don't work.
I strongly believe it's because of trying to achieve the wrong goal with the wrong tool. So many websites could just be bare html pages and forms with just a sprinkle of JS for some interactivity, but they want to add JS for whatever reason.
If you can have a complete repo browser without JS (cgit), most web applications can survive without it too.
I was a big Sevelte fan. After writing a sizeable application in Sevelte I realized that React is superior in every way overall speaking and at least you're writing 100% pure JavaScript directly. Or Typescript.
Plus the ecosystem. It's huge. Nothing comes closer.
I never wanna use anything but Svelte ever again, honestly.
Agreed. Like you, I went from hand-written cgi-bin html to jquery to angular v1 to React. I will willingly reach for React as a tool - it does what I want to do.