[coldtea]

>~15 years trying to make everyone separate HTML, JS & CSS. And then suddenly everything went south and we’re writing code like this:

That's definitely not what's bad about React. In fact that's what great about React -- coherent widgets (components) that are defined in a single place. Not to mention that JSX in React it's all JS and properly parsed and checked -- the "HTML" there is just sugar.

Such separation of HTML/JS/CSS was misconceived. It makes sense for web documents and simple forms, but not for web apps with rich widgets etc (which is what we're trying to do). Tons of problems stemmed from cargo cult adherence to that.

Everybody else, including those that add JS instructions (or ad-hoc "templating language" instructions inside HTML tags) are getting it wrong.

[threatofrain]

I'd argue that back then, focusing on elegant CSS was also a mistake. Outside of well-done libraries, I've never really perceived code re-use as a big force multiplier.

Even now with React, I still don't see much code re-use outside of libraries. When you want your code to be re-used... you exercise the discipline that a library author would. You add typings, you add documentation, you add tests, you create a Github page where people can provide info. Taking someone else's code is a commitment, so you at least want the reassurance of library-quality code.

Otherwise when you write a component, whether in the old school html/css/js split, or in React, you're unlikely to write the component in a way that optimizes for generality, and optimizing for generality, as opposed to the narrow business case in front of you, is often a lot harder.

[ldiracdelta]

And it wasn't 15 years. It been more like 40 years of trying to push Model-View-Controller architecture. Widgets instead of MVC increases code mental locality - the things that closely interact in the system are close in the code. Widgets also do not create an arbitrary cutline that doesn't fit all scenarios.