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I respect the opinion that JavaScript can be an unintuitive language to write in. The concurrent existence of abstract and strict equality operators, the former's lack of predictability, as well as their performing shallow comparison are all a fount of problems. While I can't vouch for the relevancy of the book nowadays, reading "JavaScript: The Good Parts" when I was starting out myself a) conferred a decent knowledge of the gotchas and b) helped me understand that paying the cost in decreased concision to fence off the dangerous parts of the language (e.g., the abstract "==" comparison operator) was very much worth it. Nowadays, with the abundance of linters and the existence of TypeScript, hopefully the better part of JavaScript programmers get to code in a safer, stricter subset of the language — nevertheless, as the author points out, one can trip anywhere. That being said, how do any of the above deficiencies constitute an unique indictment of React Hooks, and not, say, that of other UI frameworks or the language in general? React Hooks have introduced neither closures nor shallow comparison to the language. Most of the author's grievances are addressed fairly clearly in their comprehensive official documentation[0] (people still read manuals, right?) or quickly become self-evident through practical usage. Owing to the framework's popularity, linter support for hooks is also extensive, with one's code already being automatically verified against the majority of the documentation's commandments. There's probably not much more than a handful of classes of errors that a developer has to manually watch out for. I don't mean to say that there's nothing wrong with hooks, but a comparative review that pits them against other frameworks would have been more constructive. Lastly, the use of the "considered harmful" moniker in the title in spite of the relative scantness of constructive criticism in the article lies somewhere between clickbait, scaremongering and false expertise. It's to be considered harmful[1]. >Hooks benefit from closures because they can “see” and retain information from their scope, for instance, in the example above, user. However, with closure dependencies being implicit, it is impossible to know when to run the side-effect. The frequency at which an effect is to run is wholly orthogonal to whether the associated function accesses any variables in its environment; it is decided by the developer through setting the dependency array, which is passed as a separate argument to the useEffect function. No relation whatsoever. [0] e.g., https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-reference.html#usecallback
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744916 |