[vmware505]

I have the same feeling. I would prefer to use classes rather than functions. More natural and nicely work with Typescript.

Luckily React is only a library and it is up to you how do you use it. I got used to working with classes and objects. For bigger and serious project I prefer Ember.js, which is modern and easy to pick up (https://yoember.com), but for some tiny project React is also a good choice with Typescript.

I guess hooks is a good option for devs who prefer functional programming.

[underwater]

Classes aren't really that great in React. You typically need do a lot of juggling to co-ordinate lifecycle hooks. Trying to do something like register, update and unregister a listener feels very verbose with classes because you don't truely control the instance lifecycle – React does.

[WorldMaker]

Hooks work just fine in Typescript. Not just because Typescript already does will with Functional Programming, but because the types of most hook functions are generally rather simple.

`declare function useState<T>(startState: T): [T, (nextState: T) => void]` is pretty simple function signature and most cases Typescript picks up (infers) that T generic parameter for you based on startState. Almost every other Hook function has a similarly simple type signature, despite the complicated "guts" of how React keeps track of hooks internally. (Which also doesn't seem all that complicated, relatively speaking.)

(I still want a way to represent the order of effects / no effects in control flows rules in Typescript's type system, but linters will handle it fine. At this point it's mostly just a personal toy project/curiosity because Typescript feels like it has enough of the basic building blocks in the type system such as `never` to get quite close.)