[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.

[bobthebuilders]

Literally?

[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.