[xyzzy_plugh]

I recently was trying to diagnose a bug with React state in someone else's project. Everything I found said "install the React extension". Okay but this thing boils down to just JavaScript right? I ultimately failed to find out how to inspect anything meaningful without the extension -- it's almost as if nobody knows how React works. The abstraction is bananas. Sure, JavaScript sucks but is this better?

I swore off massive impenetrable abstractions like React eons ago and I'm saner for it. Abstractions are supposed to remove complexity, not treat users like morons.

[nicoburns]

When you're trying to debug a JavaScript error do you use Chrome's built in JavaScript debugger, or do run Chrome in GDB? Or perhaps you get out your oscilloscope and try attaching it to your CPU? Debugging at multiple levels of abstraction is nothing new.

The fact that there are debugging tools at the React level does reduce complexity. It means you don't need to understand the details of how React is implemented. You can just think in terms of React concepts (which are quite straightforward and have excellent documentation).

[TechBro8615]

It's a bit unfair to expect a framework not to provide new abstractions. That's required almost by definition.

In React's defense, it's far from "impenetrable." In fact, its API exposes less than a dozen attachment points (considering render + lifecycle methods or their hook equivalents). It's a small and stable interface on top of a simple tree structure and an intuitive reconciliation algorithm. Most of the time you don't even need to reason about its logic, but when you do, it's understandable and debuggable.

I'm also skeptical that we should consider framework-specific dev tools as evidence of an impenetrable abstraction. As long as the tools strictly enhance the debugging experience, they are a feature, not a smell. They are evidence of a problem when they only exist because it's impossible to debug the API without them.

For example, Apollo Dev Tools "strictly enhances" the debugging experience. It provides a nice UI for GraphQL specific debugging sessions, but it doesn't break the "network" tab of Dev Tools. If you want to use apollo-client without its dev tools, you're no worse off than you were before adopting apollo-client. But you do gain something if you choose to use them.

[spion]

React used to be simple, but now its indeed pretty much "impenetrable". Hooks are a strange API. Timeslicing and suspense add a lot of complexety for the benefit of very few. The processes for hooks-like funcitonality (algebraic effects) are supposed to be happening at TC39 (ESNext) level, but I can't see anything going on on that front; instead we have workaround hacks to make the API "look" like algebraic effects.

Things just need to improve there, one way or another...

[xyzzy_plugh]

Is React language or a library? Does it have its own virtual machine? If I'm debugging something that compiles down to assembly, sure, I can use GDB. Why shouldn't I be able to use the JavaScript debugger? Why does React go though so much effort to obfuscate its internals to such an extreme?

There are a million other JavaScript libraries that do not have this problem, for what it's worth.

> It means you don't need to understand the details of how React is implemented.

Isn't this the topic of discussion? Why shouldn't it be as simple as "React stores state in this variable" and I can just poke at it like any other variable?

Abstractions are great, but they all leak eventually. Being able to see through the abstraction is immensely valuable, regardless of where you are in the stack.

Don't confuse simplicity for its pernicious cousin convenience, which usually does not actually reduce complexity, but heralds it.

[nicoburns]

> Is React language or a library? Does it have its own virtual machine?

It's a library, but it does provide a runtime. As such it IMO makes sense that it would have it's own debugging tools. This is pretty common for complex frameworks. Other frontend frameworks like Angular and Vue do it. As do backend frameworks like Rails and Laravel. Or as another example you could look at Unity (the game framework).

You can still use the JavaScript debugger, and I do all the time with React code. But for React specific concepts the React specific tools provide a better experience.

> Why does React go though so much effort to obfuscate its internals to such an extreme? There are a million other JavaScript libraries that do not have this problem, for what it's worth.

It doesn't do it intentionally. It's internals are somewhat complex for performance reasons. Which other JavaScript libraries allow you to inspect their current state with the JavaScript debugger? That's what the React dev tools give you: state inspection. IME, lot's libraries make inspecting that quite difficult (unless they're using global variables).

> Why shouldn't it be as simple as "React stores state in this variable" and I can just poke at it like any other variable?

The problem is that you can't typically poke variables using the JavaScript debugger. To do so you need to get a reference to the variable. And you can only reasonably do that for globals.

> Abstractions are great, but they all leak eventually. Being able to see through the abstraction is immensely valuable, regardless of where you are in the stack.

I guess I've just never hit into the limitations of the React abstraction (and I've done pretty complex things). Nor have I ever hit a bug in the implementation. To me it's like my database or my filesystem: sure it's great to be able to peak under the hood if I really need to, but 99.9% of the time I'm super glad that I don't. I've had much worse experiences with Angular (1 and 2) where I frequently felt like the abstraction was leaking a lot.

[xyzzy_plugh]

As someone who works on and fixes bugs in databases and filesystems, perhaps we don't look at things the same way.

[hmsimha]

When you have to debug something in postgres, are you going to communicate with it by using netcat and writing your own TCP messages by hand, or use psql? Both should work, but you wouldn't say postgres is obfuscating things intentionally so that you have to use psql (or some other postgres client). The fact of the matter is that complex tools are much more useful if they also come with tools to pave over (some of) that complexity and provide a more useful interface for developer experience.

You can debug React apps just fine without the React developer extension, but in some situations it will be much harder. And to elaborate, I work on React full-time and just use the javascript console and debug messages for 99% of my debugging.

[xyzzy_plugh]

The Postgres protocol is documented extremely well such that it is actually trivial to write messages by hand, and yes, I have used netcat instead of psql.

I honestly couldn't find anything remotely similar in my search for to unearth React runtime internals. Maybe I'm missing something but literally every answer was "just use the extension."

[wonnage]

Maybe you're just not familiar enough with React? The core of it is actually quite simple, it's just a giant while loop tree traversal that gets triggered either imperatively (by calling one of the React.render* functions) or in response to a state change. The VDOM stuff is mostly orthogonal to this, it just improves performance in the browser, but you could technically skip it without losing anything.

Your argument is basically the same as saying you'd rather view HTML as a giant string rather than in a tree view... the devtools basically present something that's linear (the tree traversal) in a tree view, it's not that bad.

[coldtea]

Well, parent can find an error in a React app with a standard JS debugger, you can find an error in databases and filesystems with gdb or some such, but not vice versa.

Can be as simple as that: familiarity.

[kbenson]

I don't think that's quite it, at least not entirely. They were complaining about how everything they found on how to diagnose and inspect the problem started with downloading a third party tool.

I read this as a complaint that React doesn't provide information on what's going on that you can see and inspect (whether true or not). The equivalent for Postgres would be if they didn't document their protocol and instead referred you to a special debugger they provided, and you had to rely on that instead, making use of gdb or the equivalent much more complicated.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

The difference between a language and a library is arbitrary: it’s all an artifact of programming ecosystems that place a hard division between the “language implementors” and the “programmers”: every library of sufficient complexity is an embedded language with annoying syntax.

[agentwiggles]

I got a good chuckle at the silliness of the mental image of hooking up a scope to diagnose a JS error. Thanks for the laugh.

(tl;dr: lol)

[jorblumesea]

Debugging a popular library is not at all equivalent to those layers of abstraction. This argument is so flawed it almost feels malicious.

[nawgz]

> Okay but this thing boils down to just JavaScript right

I am not really sure I understand this stance. My JavaScript ultimately just boils down to C++, no? C++ ultimately just boils down to machine code, right? Yet you clearly wouldn't try to tackle those things at that layer.

Without more statements on what this bug was and why there weren't error messages or why it was so hard to recreate you felt you could only look at it thru a debugger, I really completely fail to understand your point.

> Abstractions are supposed to remove complexity

React does remove a ton of complexity from writing frontend - good luck composing HTML & JS components with just jQuery - but in exchange it also introduces some, of course. So they make that new and different complexity easier to handle with their dev tools.

> I swore off abstractions ... [that] treat users like morons

I really have a tough time to read this charitably. What on earth are you on about?

[azangru]

> I recently was trying to diagnose a bug with React state in someone else's project. Everything I found said "install the React extension"

Really curious what you mean by that.

There are two possible Chrome (not React) extensions for dev tools that I can think of — one is the "official" extension by React core team that helps visualise components better and also helps understand why they may have rerendered. The other is a redux extension that's very helpful to inspect all the actions that were dispatched against the store and the changes they caused in the redux state. None sounds like what you are describing. Bugs with React state should be easy to diagnose just with a handful of console logs.

[diob]

Honest question though, what abstraction do you use in place of React?

I don't disagree that it's pretty obtuse, despite loving working in it. I miss being able to look up the source of Backbone.js and gain a real understanding of why something was happening. Maybe I'll get to that point in React, but it seems much harder to grasp what the source is doing.

[xyzzy_plugh]

I just write JavaScript? The concepts of Basecamp's Hotwire[0] are particularly simple and elegant enough for the 1% of stuff that isn't just a static page or can't be solved in a single JS function.

I've never been like "boy I really need a virtual DOM" so I guess I've never really seen the appeal of React. It just seems like a bundle of complexity, obfuscation and anti-patterns.

0: https://hotwire.dev

[qudat]

> I just write JavaScript?

This is the tell. If you are able to satisfy your business requirements with "just JavaScript" then you are in a completely different world than the people building production-grade web apps and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you can be productive with "just JavaScript" then that's awesome!

However, I'm sure you understand there's a massive difference between simple pages that need *some* interactivity and a full-blown app inside a web browser.

I'm sure you've come across projects that probably didn't need the same tooling that I'm describing which ultimately boils down to a judgement call.

> I've never been like "boy I really need a virtual DOM" so I guess I've never really seen the appeal of React. It just seems like a bundle of complexity, obfuscation and anti-patterns.

That's because you've never needed it before. I've never been like "boy I really need a batteries-included web framework" so I guess I've never really seen the appeal of Rails. It just seems like a bundle of complexity, obfuscation and anti-patterns.

[gmfawcett]

> ...than the people building production-grade web apps...

Please don't co-opt the word "production" to mean what you're implying here. Production doesn't mean single-page, reactive, etc. applications, it just means "in production."

[InvertedRhodium]

I agree. My workplace has at least a dozen applications deployed to production with "just JS" and they're just at production ready as a react stack would be.

Source: Running "just JS" in production for more than 6 years.

[bobthebuilders]

Words are given a meaning by society.

[gmfawcett]

Obviously? And a society needs to correct misuses if it wants its words to keep meaning things.

[xyzzy_plugh]

I'm curious -- what is not possible with just JavaScript? Why do you assume "a full-blown app inside a web browser" isn't possible without React or something like it?

Is client-side rendering strictly necessary? Do your websites actually run offline?

I've built websites with React, used React Native -- none of it is necessary, nor the end-all-be-all. There's nothing truly novel going on. You can accomplish the exact same experience with server-side rendering and a tiny smattering of vanilla JS (you can use modern JS and polyfills and webpack/esbuild without React, you know).

For 99.9% of the web, I'd argue you don't need it. I have yet to encounter the 0.1% personally.

If you don't believe me, know that I'm not alone. Take a look at https://levels.io/deviance/ -- PHP and jQuery. What would React provide that isn't possible with his stack?

There is a disturbing amount of kool-aid being consumed around React/Vue/etc. Sure, you can slap together a website in record time with massive boilerplate/templates -- but so can I.

[__s]

Here's your 0.1%: a card game, https://etg.dek.im before React I was using PIXI.js, over the years it's transitioned from being fully rendered in canvas to not using canvas at all (& now uses webpack, but years ago I had my own bundler mkcjs https://github.com/serprex/mkcjs which was pretty vanilla js, using require let me share code for awhile between server/client until server was rewritten in Rust)

react-motion made animating card transitions very straight forward

During a game you can click on history items to look at previous game states, this is very straight forward with React's model

Sure you could get this all by rolling your own state dom renderer, but that's like saying you can do everything Lisp does in C. Greenspun's tenth rule rephrased as "Any sufficiently complicated JavaScript UI contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of React."

[flippinburgers]

Websites that are "production-grade" can be built without tools like react.

[amenod]

While you don't _need_ React (or a similar powerful library / framework), it takes one's productivity to a whole different level.

I have a feeling that you have already made up your mind not to like it, but if you ever give it a fair try, you might find it useful for some projects. It is very complex under the hood, of course, so if you want to have total control you might need to dig into the internals. But to a casual user it gives a very nice abstraction, very powerful, easy to use (granted - and abuse) and performant. The thing that sold it for me is the declarative programming. You have state, state translates to rendering... and that's pretty much it. Compared to thinking about transitions in native JS (or jQuery or whatever) it is like night and day in any non-trivial project.

[xyzzy_plugh]

I've tried it. And yes, I want full control. The abstractions mostly work, but when they don't -- there you are again, thinking about transitions in native JS again. What was the point?

[amenod]

Well, newsflash: you are always dealing with abstractions, no matter which layer you pick. You might just as well pick one that lets you develop more complex things faster and more reliably. That said, if you are set on actively fighting it (not installing react dev tools, being frustrated by not having visibility under the hood) then it's probably best to stay away from React.

I have quite a lot of history with native JS, but was happy to relinquish control to webpack/babel/react... not at first (had the same reaction as you do), but once I gave it a fair chance I discovered that things just work. Never had any problem with React not performing the way it should.

[axelf4]

I consider part of the blame to lie with React. The React source code structure is pretty obtuse. Compare that to the Inferno.js source code which is easy to understand and navigate for anyone familiar with how a VDOM library should work.

[jokethrowaway]

this, I understood how react is supposed to be used by reading the preact codebase

[vaughan]

I miss Backbone too. You could just step through the code in the debugger and it was so compact.

With React you can’t really do that. It’s always following an error message saying: “look near this component” which is often deep in the hierarchy of some third party package’s component hierarchy that is transpiled into a single line with no source maps.

I think there is a huge benefit in making things easy to step-through in a debugger when something goes wrong.

[arcanon]

That’s because Jeremy Ashkenas is a beast. Coffeescript started modern JavaScript.

[apatheticonion]

Try to implement a website without React or Angular/Vue.

When you hit your first list of elements and need to rerender the contents of just one of the elements, you will begin writing your own React.

If you try to implement some kind of "two way databinding", you will first create React, then create Angular.

However, unreadable and disorganised code can be written at any abstraction level. I have found React projects to be particularly hideous due to the fixation engineers have for tools like Redux.

Angular tends to be a bit better because it's got some decent software design principles built in - but you know front end engineers. Any project with ngrx is a write off from an readability perspective.

Isomorphic applications are also a meme that kill readability.

I write most of my personal projects using Preact and some kind of reactivity helper (RIP `Object.observe`, I grieve for you).

[lr4444lr]

You're not wrong, but I think you're missing the value of React: the simplicity is not having to worry about the correctness or efficiency of your render engine. You get to go back to a more declarative way of writing code that comes with a modular composable style. There's a cost to pay for this: surrendering control (and easy insight) of the DOM you once knew to React's core logic. You do get a variety of callbacks to hook into, and I always encourage people to learn more about their frameworks, but you're not buying a set of convenience methods like you were with jQuery: this is effectively an interpreter between your data and its rendering.

[flippinburgers]

I have a deep love/hate relationship with react so I largely agree with you.

The last time I used the extension, it was obnoxious to use to try to find "state" within the page. Using redux makes things easier to debug from this perspective but you do need yet another extension for that too...

I really think this is a sign of young engineers who have no experience with older approaches just memorizing "how things are done". They have no perspective on the tooling or experience.

[schwartzworld]

The react extension is pretty powerful. You can work without it, but it enables debugging techniques that would be much harder without it.

[nsonha]

not a good example, knowing how things work is not a reason not to use debugger or similar tools