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by sophiebits 2675 days ago
(I worked on React.) Many people have adopted React and are happy with it, evidently because they believe the problems it creates are minor compared to the problems it fixes.

It’s rather reasonable for them to be excited about a new version that keeps (or improves!) the good parts while having fewer tradeoffs.

2 comments

React is amazing. I'm teaching myself JS — started October '17 — and I've gone through a few iterations of my little project as I learn more.

- Vanilla JS: it works, but holy moly it looks bad and the amount of code I have to write to do even basic stuff really really hurts my brain. (Actually what am I talking about, it never got close to "working" before I moved on to...)

- jQuery/Node: ooh, this is better. But still, doing stuff takes ages.

- React: OH MY GOD WHAT IS THIS HEAVEN.

People will say that "people like me" shouldn't be writing web apps if we don't know what we're doing. To them I say, screw you. These tools enable us to do things that would never have been possible.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for doing whatever it is that you did. :-)

I was initially resistant to a lot of react, for example, jsx. However as a backend dev (functional) I was very pleased when I could dive into react code and reliably implement features as needed.
Thanks for all your great work sophiebits. React is perhaps the most important milestone in bringing functional concepts to the mainstream to date, and the project has been really well managed. It makes backend people like me actually enjoy writing JavaScript! Excited to see what you do next.