[Exinferis]

Although the article is too generic, or not detailed enough regarding examples of what he states, I have to agree with what he is trying to say. React hooks are a mess, or at least code based around it tends to be. We have had our share of hooks based applications and they've become unmaintainable when reaching a certain size and I am glad that we are back to class based components wherever we can. In may opinion this comes down to the fact - as he states - that the mental model (what will happen, when I do this) is not simple to grasp, thus not predictable for many people.

[wokwokwok]

You realize you've just done exactly what the parent complained about right?

- said it was bad

- not provided any concrete details

> they've become unmaintainable when reaching a certain size

How?

Did you start getting lot of hard to replicate bugs?

Did you find authoring new components was made difficult by your heavy use of custom hooks that were actually not as generic as you thought when you wrote them?

Did you find 3rd-party hooks had bugs?

Did you find that useRef doesn't work like you think it does, and you can't mix and match useRef and useEffect? (ouch)

What kind components are you writing that you find hooks are such a bad fit for?

Be specific.

(I'm not saying hooks are perfect; I've had all of the issues I listed happen to me, but it's still quicker to implement new features on a medium sized web app using hooks than with components in my experience; I work on 3 apps, and only one of them still uses components, and it's the most annoying to make changes too, simply because for simple business components & forms, hooks seem to reduce the amount of boiler plate, and flat out, reduce the lines of code; less code -> faster changes. It's not always that simple (see bugs comment above), but mostly... it is, in my experience: ...HOWEVER, what you've done is just wave your hands vaguely and fail to actually say anything except you don't like hooks)

[bpicolo]

A mental model being complex to grasp is concrete. Complexity is one of the biggest challenges in software.

One of my favorite papers on it: https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...

[wokwokwok]

You don't need to understand all the stuff you use.

How complex it is is not relevant unless it has a tangible impact.

eg. I use spark a lot. I don't really deeply understand how the DAG is translated into a distributed computation and the results are aggregated from the cluster.

It calculates things. It's fast. Sometimes I'm surprised by things that are slower than I expect. Oh well. Don't do lots of column renames. /shrug

It's a tradeoff.

Is the effort to understand the detail worth the benefit of doing so? Does not understanding it cause enough pain that it become prohibitive to develop using it?

Is it for spark? No. I really don't care how it's implemented. I don't even know scala. It works fine.

Is it for assembly? No. I don't care at all how my code is JIT'd to assembly / code. It just works.

It it for react hooks? I honestly haven't personally found it to be... but I don't write custom hooks much.

So, your experience with hooks might be different, and you may find the trade-off is more expensive if your case, because it tangibly causes, eg. bugs when you write your code.

...but you are quite wrong if you think that not understanding how something works is a fundamental obstacle to using it.

That is categorically false.

I would argue that it's far from proven that using complex systems necessarily causes the complexity of your system to balloon out of control... or that there is even a strong casual relationship between "mental model being complex to grasp" and the resulting complexity of the system.

[crispyambulance]

  > ...it's far from proven that using complex systems necessarily causes the complexity of your system to balloon...

I don't know what "proven" would actually mean in this context, but there's a notion called "leaky abstraction". It bites you hard when you use a "do-everything" framework and something goes wrong.

All of sudden, the magic stops and you have to deal with a ream of obtuse stack traces, problems that completely smash your metal model of what's going on, and you end up in deep rabbit holes of stuff you don't want to get into at the worst possible time. That is a fundamental obstacle.

[briantakita]

All things given, I'd rather use a tool that does not have leaky abstractions and if I need to investigate the inner workings of an abstraction, I can form a mental model of that abstraction with little effort. To your point, you don't need to understand the inner workings of your tools, but being able to quickly learn about the inner workings of the tools is beneficial to creating abstractions, crafting solutions, fixing issues, performing refactoring, tracking the usage of concepts across the codebase, etc.

[bpicolo]

The mental model of usage is the problem, not the mental model of its internals.

[wokwokwok]

no, its not.

Thats the point: the mental model is irrelevant unless it causes bugs when you use it wrong.

Does it? Does it actually cause bugs?

Not, “in general”; You’re just doing the same thing again here and doing vague hand waving. What actual bugs? What types of bugs?

Be specific

(yes, it does cause bugs, but see how this conversation is pointless when you don’t provide any details? Right, now go read the first post in this thread.)

[alfonsodev]

> React hooks are a mess, or at least code based around it tends to be.

I've read a lot warnings about the pitfalls, and about hooks not doing what you think they are doing, but honestly, I haven't experience any of that, maybe because my use cases are so close to the documented ones, that I don't need to stretch the concept, and it just works as intended for me.

Could it be, that as with many other programming patterns, some developers are using it as a silver bullet, and trying to solve everything with hooks?

Otherwise I'm failing to understand, it would be useful to see examples as the mentioned above.

[dkarl]

I am mostly a spectator in this argument, since I'm holding out as long as possible on committing to hooks, but the impression I got from the React Hooks FAQ is that hooks are supposed to be a silver bullet:

> Should I use Hooks, classes, or a mix of both? [0]

> When you’re ready, we’d encourage you to start trying Hooks in new components you write. [snip]

> Do Hooks cover all use cases for classes? [1]

> Our goal is for Hooks to cover all use cases for classes as soon as possible. [snip]

The answer about higher-order components is a little more nuanced but does say hooks should replace most of them:

> Do Hooks replace render props and higher-order components? [2]

> Often, render props and higher-order components render only a single child. We think Hooks are a simpler way to serve this use case. There is still a place for both patterns (for example, a virtual scroller component might have a renderItem prop, or a visual container component might have its own DOM structure). But in most cases, Hooks will be sufficient and can help reduce nesting in your tree.

Learning enough about the React lifecycle to make simple apps was a big task, but it felt like a bounded one for my purposes. Learnings hooks seems... strangely open-ended. There's a small set of built-in hooks that do certain things, and if I need more I'm supposed to build new hooks out of the old ones, and that's supposed to be it. Except that it isn't, because if that's all there was to it, people wouldn't be having difficulty. I just wish the rest of the story was sketched out and bounded for me in some way so I could know what I was getting into.

  [0] https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-faq.html#should-i-use-hooks-classes-or-a-mix-of-both
  [1] https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-faq.html#do-hooks-cover-all-use-cases-for-classes
  [2] https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-faq.html#do-hooks-replace-render-props-and-higher-order-components

[alfonsodev]

> people wouldn't be having difficulty.

I remember people having difficulty with callbacks, then with generators, then with promises, Obersavables... you get the point. There is always something new that tries to make 80% of the cases trivial with a new elegant syntax that hides a lot of complexity, and comes with that 20% of cases where it is harder to grasp.

[emerongi]

Hooks are a bit of a double-edged sword in my opinion.

On the one hand, they are nicely composable. You can make one hook call depend on another and you can easily build a lot of cool functionality thanks to this. On the other hand, you are no longer able to directly follow the flow of the code. Making a change to a series of hook calls can sometimes be scary to me as it can be hard to fully understand the cause-and-effect of that change.

On the one hand, you can hide a lot of complexity behind a simple `useSomething()` call, on the other hand the code inside `useSomething()` can be absolute horror, because all the stateful logic is handled through hooks. Any non-obvious use-case ends up being a mess of hook calls. If you only write the code once and never need to touch it again, `useSomething()` can be an amazing hook though. There are some hooks that I have written that I hope I (or anyone else) don't ever have to touch. I might just be a bad programmer though, or missing some obvious patterns.

TLDR: hooks work well, but they have downsides in terms of maintenance burden

[ssijak]

On the other end you can compose class components which have lifecycle methods which you need to jump through up and down the code to figure out the full behavior. Which to me is much more unreadable than hooks and effects. Not to mention that lifecycle methods have their own gotchas.

[madeofpalk]

> On the other hand, you are no longer able to directly follow the flow of the code.

Hooks are, at least as they're presented on the surface level, exceptionally functional, so shouldnt it be easier to directly follow the code? Just follow the function calls?

[sydd]

> There are some hooks that I have written that I hope I (or anyone else) don't ever have to touch.

If you need to make such statements something is very wrong. Either your code or with the design patterns you're forced into by your framework/library

[laurent123456]

My experience has been the exact opposite. Class-based components encourage creating large monolithic classes because it's hard to split class methods into smaller units.

With hooks however, you can create self-contained custom hooks that group all the code of a feature in one separate file. It's much easier to test and to make sense of. It's also easier to make the hook more generic and re-usable when it becomes needed by other components.

I'm definitely not going back to class-based components as I find React hooks a lot easier to manage and maintain.

[Emanation]

How is the mental model hard to grasp? Hooks are just functional components. They render information like everything else. Following the same rule set. State change? The hooks renders. Parent renders? The hook renders. Want to stop it from rendering? Use a memo. Want to run logic only when certain state changes? Use an effect.

[cwhiz]

I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I loathe class components and convert to hooks whenever I can. Class components seem so bloated and enormous with anything but the most simple use cases.

Sometimes when I read these comments I feel like I am using a completely different library.