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by rbcoffee 3959 days ago
It would be interesting to see a side by side comparison of people coding for the exact same output, and the time difference between them. If React is supposed to make coding faster, then why is the code a black box? Why do I have to debug the React source code to find out what's going on. Too much div soup, too much abstraction. I genuinely would love to see a code-off between developers where they make a simple TODO app, with one in vanilla JS and the other in React. Presuming the React developer has mastered React and won't run into some form of roadblock (which is rare).
1 comments

You cannot really compare a React project with a non-React project if it is done by different people.

We use React since four months, and we develop faster compared to before, when we used only jQuery.

Was that because you now structure you code in a better way, or was it because of React's functionality? And what aspect of the functionality was the most productive? The templating system? Did you used to hand-code your HTML in jQuery, or did you use templates in the HTML document?

(Genuine questions, not making a point).

A bit of both. With React we now have a much nicer code structure, because it forces us to think in components. We have a JS file and an SCSS file for each component. Before we rendered the view on the server side with Python/Jinja2.

I think there are many reasons for the productivity boost. Thinking in components, more readable code, great debugging possibilities, understandable data flow, to name a few.

And, last but not least, it is lots of fun :-).