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by jwaldrip 2904 days ago
There are so many wrong things said in this post. First off, much of this is a comparison between react (not react-native) and flutter. React-native does not use webviews or a DOM. It uses similar paradigms to flutter, just written in dart rather than javascript.
4 comments

>It uses similar paradigms to flutter

But it's common these days to confuse reader to make self promotion for their tech/services

A huge amount article's on Medium are similar to this one, they stay at the surface and don't really bring anything new to table.

The point of this article wasn't self-promotion at all, and I certainly mentioned the similarities between Flutter and React. The point is to highlight the differences, and that when using Flutter, you need to keep said differences in mind.

EDIT: I'm not so sure as to what you mean by "staying at the surface," though - I included examples of patterns that are common in React, their analogues in Flutter, and the reasons why said patterns may or may not apply well in Flutter.

Yes, and this articles does the writer a huge disservice, especially when it comes on the HN front-page :(
Except that Flutter does not compose the native UI widgets but draws its own (with physics etc...)
Well, they list "Inheritance + Polymorphism" as a pro.

Sounds like the writer hasn't too much experience, so be kind :)

Mmmm, no kidding. Stateless functional components are the absolute bomb from a “reasoning about your code” perspective.

FWIW I’ve found the most prosuctive front-end combination to be React + Typescript, which has the benefit of being seamlessly interoperable with JavaScript, really excellent at capturing common errors, and allowing the type system to be exploited for much more expressive code. YMMV of course.

I tried Flow with VSCode and found it rather flaky. Had to open up files to get autocomplete etc.

Is TypeScript better in that regard?

I’ve had no problems with Typescript in that regard (in fact the typechecking and linting is astonishingly fast) but I’m using Sublime integration. From what I understand though, VSCode has very thorough Typescript support, given its Microsoft pedigree and all.
> I tried Flow with VSCode and found it rather flaky. Had to open up files to get autocomplete etc.

Sounds like an editor issue. Have you tried it with something like IDEA/WebStorm where there's a bit more code intelligence?

This seems like a very uncharitable reading of the article.

Inheritance has it's place in the toolbox.

I could have worded it better, but my point in that sentence was that React targets the DOM. Overall, the goal of the article isn't to say that React or Flutter is better than the other, it's specifically to say that to be effective with Flutter, you can't view it as being the same as React, which I feel was clearly stated.
React isn't Flutter competition, React-Native is and it doesn't target the DOM.