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by coldnebo
3544 days ago
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React is a lot more than it seems. The essential problem it tries to solve is componentization: how can you have a large team of varying skill work on separate parts of a page in a web application without one part breaking the others in hard to detect ways? Many people focus on JSX or virtual DOM and muse about how that just duplicates the browser-- what's the point? But that isn't the point. It's componentization and encapsulation for large teams at scale, and for Facebook it works, it makes them more successful at pulling together disparate modules on a single page than their competitors, so there is some meat to this $NEWSHINY. Now, if the browser itself had been properly designed years ago to be componentized and encapsulated, we'd have those features without inventing a new DOM or creating a new tagging language or isolating CSS. There is a web components standard that offers much of the same thing... It came out around the same time as React, but still isn't widely used outside of Google Polymer. Truth is these were developed in parallel before they knew of each other. Anyway, React makes a lot more sense if you think of it as rewritting the browser from outside the browser. In the old days the stack that would have been hard to impossible-- you would have simply started your own browser. And people would have shamed you for not following existing standards, so you would have petitioned the W3C or served on committees to bring your real-world cases for years, being mostly ignored. Now, devs have the ability to change the browser quickly and find things that work (and also create chaos and suffering). Meh. Kids. ;) |
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Every framework is about componentization and encapsulation.
You could take React out of your post and replace it with any framework name in the last 40 years and it would have made 'sense' at the time.
Like the author said, right now a veteran looks at react and sees the mistakes of 15 years ago when we mixed code and presentation.