[danabramov]

That's my point: there was no breaking change :-)

React.createClass() always did (and still does) autobinding.

ES6 classes never supported autobinding.

We couldn't have changed your code from one to the other. There is no "release notes" associated with that change—changing the syntax was a conscious decision you made either when converting or when writing a new components.

[vanderZwan]

If you already know about ES6 classes, what you say is obvious, I'm sure. Or if you're in a place where someone more experienced can teach you. Neither of those things applied to me. I had no prior webdev experience, used to languages where this does not behave like it does in JS, and relying on documentation to guide me.

It can be nearly impossible to Google something if you don't even know what it is that you don't know.

There's a comment by, well, YOU, from March this year[0] on a github issue discussing improvements to documentation, suggesting it is one of the most common troubleshooting issues, so I'm not the only idiot failing to grasp this when first diving into webdev.

It would help tremendously if there was even just a simple sentence in the tutorial like:

> "By the way, we are using an arrow function here because JavaScript has some subtle behaviour when it comes to this, but explaining the details of that here would take too long. See [here], [here] and [here]"

.. with a few links explaining both this and ES6 classes in more detail. Because otherwise you can easily get stuck not even knowing where to look for the cause of the bug.

[0] https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/8060#issuecomment-2...

[always_good]

I think you need to take some personal responsibility here for not knowing how Javascript works.

That you've written so much indicates to me that you expect other people (like a framework's documentation) to introduce you to every language idiosyncrasy in any place you happen to be reading.

That's not what I want people to expect from me as a professional. People should be able to expect me to credentialize in the domain at hand.

[vanderZwan]

I sincerely hope you never have and never will work in education, or in any way have to teach others how something works.

[amk_]

Still, it isn't entirely obvious under what conditions the methods of a React Component class are going to be called. For all you know they might always be called against the instance.

[danabramov]

Would you like to send a PR? I don't mean to sound defensively, but I have spent a huge amount of effort on docs in the past, and as you can see they're still not good. :-) So some help from you (you know the pain points!) would be handy.

[threatofrain]

The subtlety that arrow functions are different would bite you anywhere in javascript, including vanilla. It should come up if you read the MDN documentation on this or arrow functions.

[eyelidlessness]

While you're right that there was no breaking change, it isn't unreasonable for a developer to expect, when a feature is introduced that is analogous to an existing feature, that the new feature's differences will be explained.