[macspoofing]

>This is complete and utter nonsense. Were you programming seriously before React?

Indeed I was.

>There were like 50 popular frameworks all competing with each other and no one framework dominated. React has completely taken over because it provided a dramatically better developer experience and solved a lot of hard and very real problems.

I'm not saying React isn't a good framework, it is perfectly nice, though I think you're overstating it. AngularJS was a perfectly fine framework as well, and that was out long before React.

>Dismissing Svelt's success/failure by saying all framework success is because of fads is an excuse and, if you are part of the Svelt community

I'm not part of Svelt's community. I haven't actually used Svelt at all. I barely know about it. But I've been around for a while. Why certain frameworks go viral and others do not, is not always based on merit. I'll buy the argument that Svelt doesn't have enough of a benefit over React ... it also came out a few years later and doesn't have Facebook's marketing weight behind it either. Does that mean React is the best thing ever? Eh, it's alright. Having done everything from Flash/Flex/Starling, to Silverlight, to Backbone, to AngularJS, to React, I actually get more excited about State management patterns than widget overlays with some declarative patterns and data-biding. By the way, when it comes to ergonomics of building complex SPAs, I think we're just hitting the place that Flash/Flex was 15 years ago in Web Development.

[eagsalazar2]

I'm not sure I'd agree that when React took over, Angular was a perfectly fine framework. I mean, what happened with React was actually very unusual and remains very unusual. It took over. There is this popular and snarky notion that js devs are constantly chasing every shiny thing but that is exactly the opposite of what has happened over the last several years with React. Instead I'd argue that js devs were nomads prior to React because none of the existing solutions were solving the big problems they had. Not because they are ADD fad chasers. Also I don't remember seeing React "marketing" any more than any other framework. Of course when Google or FB or any other major player gets behind a framework, we take notice, but that doesn't have anything to do with why React took off. It won because frp in a FE framework with the Flux pattern was a total game changer and made FE development awesome for the first time ever (well since Flex, I'll take your word for it since that is even before my time (I cut my FE teeth on jquery and Dojo!))

[miracle2k]

When React first come out, the whole notion of mixing HTML and Javascript code was, if anything, widely rejected. Rather than going viral as a kind of fashionable thing, I feel that it really had to earn its position.

[macspoofing]

>When React first come out, the whole notion of mixing HTML and Javascript code was, if anything, widely rejected.

And it still is. Mixing JS and HTML/DOM does result in fragile code and you shouldn't do it. React VDOM and JSX is not the same thing .. at all. Again, JSX isn't new. XML-based declarative UI frameworks with data-biding were an old thing by the time React arrived on the scene. That's how Flash Flex (MXML) and Silverlight (XAML) worked, for example.

[Marazan]

Angular was a hot mess and I found it a nightmare to program with.

It basically embodied the bad side of JS frameworks pre-React.

It managed to take alllll the wrong lessons from Flex.