[dutchCourage]

It's a statement I see regularly on HN and that confuses me. Something like Next.js gives you the power and structure of React while doing a great job of hiding any complexity under the hood. And it scales really well, whether you need a complex website or just a set of static pages.

I'm not sure why jQuery is mentioned either. It was popular when I started programming but fell out favour when its major functionalities were implemented in ECMAScript.

What am I missing?

[uk_programmer]

In the past most websites were Rendered HTML from a language such as PHP / Java / C# / Perl and then they had a small amount of JavaScript over the top for interactivity and client side form validation i.e. when you submitted a form a full postback to the server was made. jQuery bridged the browser compatibility problem that existed at time. So most sites were built using jQuery + Server side MVC framework + SQL Database. Overtime more and more logic was pushed onto the client side (mostly updates via AJAX) and eventually JavaScript MVC frameworks were written to deal with the extra complexity. Angular / React etc are just the latest incarnation of these.

However much of the JavaScript written on those sites was done by back end programmers who didn't really understand jQuery or JavaScript and thus you ended up with jQuery spagetti code which others have lamented about. However if you were proficient with JavaScript at the time you could use a few JavaScript patterns and keep everything fairly clean.

This architecture while dated works incredibly well (minus the jQuery spagetti) for quite a few web applications. This includes everything from shopping sites, bespoke CRUD apps, Forms etc. However it isn't cool, it doesn't look as good on your CV and you actually have to really understand what you are doing to keep it performant.

[blackandblue]

still unsure i follow. i must be missing something... react does not prevent anyone from using jquery afaik. in fact, anyone can go ahead and use jquery with react if they want.

react is doing what php did a while ago (and is still doing). it's mixing frontend with backend stuff. i personally find it refreshing!

we did that for a while then people came and told us how bad it was and we needed to do strict MVC or whatnot. now everybody is doing it and it's cool again!

[uk_programmer]

> still unsure i follow. i must be missing something... react does not prevent anyone from using jquery afaik. in fact, anyone can go ahead and use jquery with react if they want.

React / Angular JS etc tend to require spending a lot of time learning how it works first. Then you have to build almost all your application around it. This can take a lot of time, which pushed up costs and complexity. If you are building something like Google Docs or Google Maps you want to build it like a SPA. For a lot of the sites I've worked on in the past building it as a SPA was completely unnecessary.

> react is doing what php did a while ago (and is still doing). it's mixing frontend with backend stuff. i personally find it refreshing!

We've been trying to get away from that for quite a while. I try to write almost all my JavaScript in a way that assumes as little as possible about the page structure, the web application etc. It can be done, however it requires thinking about how your markup works and how the page works.

Generally you should have good separation between your markup, your styling and your scripts.

> we did that for a while then people came and told us how bad it was and we needed to do strict MVC or whatnot. now everybody is doing it and it's cool again!

The problem is that it is cool again. I don't want my backend code tied to my front end code.

[qwerty123457]

React is easy as hell to learn nowadays, I'd say about as easy to get into as as PHP. Any semi-experienced developer will be writing production grade code after at most a week of learning.

[uk_programmer]

Is it? Because there is normally things like JSX, React Router, Redux and a lot of other stuff that you have to learn with it to build an application.

I've seen fairly decent backend developers having a right mare trying to get their head around just the npm tooling (no it isn't obvious if you haven't worked with it before).

People don't realise that there is a lot of the eco-system you have to learn just to do something fairly basic. You also have to unlearn things that you've done before elsewhere which itself can be difficult.

So I find this hard to believe.

Anyway this is going down the road of "why don't you use this it is easy?" which isn't the point I was originally making. I personally getting fed up of all the bloody tooling you have to learn to make something basic, when I can just ignore it and go back to basics.

[jariel]

So this isn't quite true for a few reasons.

Reach is quite a different abstraction than we are used to, it's huge and prolific.

It generally takes some time to get used to it. Though one might be able to do 'some production quality stuff' in a week, generally speaking, there's far too much that anyone is going to master in a week.

[wltprgm]

> 'm not sure why jQuery is mentioned either. It was popular when I started programming but fell out favour when its major functionalities were implemented in ECMAScript.

less than a year ago I was doing Magento, yea, jQuery is still there.

Now working on an already established Angular web and hybrid mobile apps, I saw jQuery symbol, and immediately checked it in the source, really surprised to see it there