[Existenceblinks]

When a react component tree has more than 3 level height, react component's lifecycle callbacks start getting crazy unmanageable.

Mounting, unmounting, rendering, props receiving, updating etc, these callbacks' calling orders open to bad rendering practice(e.g. unnecessary render, unexpected calls), that's why people avoid putting logics in there. It claims to be self-contained but parent-child communication breaks it in several ways, I am not a big fan of HOC.

People claim the simple of "just a view layer" of react, I don't think so. I haven't tried vuejs, but it seems like it takes care of most rendering callbacks/component communication seamlessly.

[lojack]

> It claims to be self-contained but parent-child communication breaks it in several ways

I think you'll find that most react developers advise against doing parent-child communication in react components for all but the simplest cases. Does it involve writing higher order components? Probably. Curious, why aren't you a big fan of them?

[Existenceblinks]

Higher order components to me is a hacky technique and mostly seen as a monkey patch to the limitation of lower component.

A concrete example is responsive table components with the help of HOC, says `react-dimensions` (sorry author, I have to mention here but there is nothing specifically wrong with it), why do I need it as a separate component? Oh flexibility and reusability but when I tried wrapping 2 or 3 table libraries with it, it sucks at rendering on desktop, even worse on mobile! I gave up on performance issue. Ah that doesn't mean the HOC technique itself is bad, but from my experience it is.

[fleshweasel]

I know what you mean with regard to event handlers being passed down to children and children of children and so on and the complexity that can bring. I haven't used redux, but I understand it as being an attempt to simplify that kind of problem.

I haven't written any higher order components myself, unless you consider parameterizing event handlers in props to be higher order.

[Existenceblinks]

Composing pure functions makes more sense, passing function as argument in functional languages is way better than having the higher order component thing. Sure javascript can do that but in the react world, "component" thing go with you everywhere regardless of presentation or dumbest components.