[steve_adams_86]

You also get convention. jQuery didn't offer much of that once you started gluing its functions together...

I can usually jump into someone's react code and get what's going on pretty quickly unless they did something really gnarly with incredibly nested props. Even then, at least I still know where to drill down. With jQuery soup, you didn't get that luxury.

Being able to have an entire team know how to build components and provide them with functionality is an incredible advantage. I don't love everything about react either, but the ecosystem, somewhat enforced convention, tooling, etc - it's worth it (so far).

I love some things about Vue, but it isn't a silver bullet either. Brad seems to be pretty butt hurt about react. If you've worked on a large team without something like react, then worked on one with react, it really shines. It's a major productivity booster.

It's not perfect, but it's very good.

[paulddraper]

jQuery had a lot of convention, for both it and it's plugins.

jQuery + co. have very consistent "look and feel"

[girvo]

I agree when you’re talking about the most well known of plugins and so on, but IME for application code all that goes out the window. A lot of developers really didn’t know how to write JavaScript back then. Still don’t, but we didn’t then either ;)

[steve_adams_86]

I agree that the library has great convention. I actually learned quite a bit from that API when I was starting out. The only problem was you could really abuse the usage of the API.

I'm realizing now that this isn't a fair comparison. React 'wins' here largely because it has a smaller scope. It's for giving functionality to templates built in the library using a certain approach. jQuery was far more open ended and far less opinionated. That was as much it's strength as it's weakness.

It's definitely not a direct comparison. But I do think react is a nice safe tool for larger teams.