[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