[lloydatkinson]

It’s strange that of the numerous frameworks React seems to have the most churn, it’s had multiple ways of “doing state”, there seems to be a new router every year or at the very least a new major (breaking) version of react router.

Why is routing, of all things, in such need of constant development? I say this as someone that’s made SPAs with Vue a lot and occasionally React.

[ratww]

Because making a simple router or simple state management library from scratch is quite simple. So a lot of people do them to learn how the internals work, like this case here. This makes people better programmers. Some of those folks will then decide to continue the development, put some special things here and there and release it to the world to see if anyone is interested in their version of it. Most of those are ignored, which is fine.

However this makes some people vocally angry, because in theory a developer should know every single packages in the world, but never the internals. Only people of a higher class or caste should be allowed to release stuff to the world. The rest are peasants. How dare they. /s

[andybak]

I think you're being uncharitable.

The reason people say this is because the scale of the problem is much, much worse in front-end javascript than in most other language communites and it's a real problem for people attempting to get to grips with best practice.

If your explanation was correct then we'd see the same problem everywhere at the same scale but there's something about front-end javascript that seems to exacerbate this issue.

[ratww]

I disagree that the scale of the problem is worse in the Frontend.

About being uncharitable: IMO this constant mischaracterization of frontend is the real uncharitable thing here.

I also do a lot of backend work and even the most "traditionally stable" programming languages (or frameworks) have a lot of churn in libraries, frameworks, patterns, toolchains, deployment methods and architectures. Which is "fine", that's how programming works!

But heck, I worked recently on a 8 year old Rails app that had four different methods/libraries/frameworks being used to wrap business code. But in the frontend that would be extremely rare.

If anything the frontend has been quite stable for the last 7 years or so when we settled on mostly React or Vue. The only real big change was Hooks, and even that was incremental and was an attempt to solve real problems in the ecosystem.

[mhoad]

This is basically gaslighting. F/E churn is still wild. I’m staring at an article right now titled the top 14 react libraries you must try in 2020. That’s not a normal thing for a ten year old framework.

[ratww]

How is this gaslighting? Just because someone wrote an article to profit on your FOMO doesn't mean React (and also Vue) usage in the real world hasn't been extremely stable over the years. If anything, this kind of article is the one trying to fuck with your psyche.

You don't need any of the libraries in the article to make a good React app/website. Period. No, not even React-Router or Redux. And those two are probably the only ones that you'll see lots of companies/devs that actually ship stuff using. And both of them are not even that complicated, as is demonstrated in this article for the Router. Redux is also quite simple (hence why there's so many alternative implementations).

If anything the ones doing the gaslighting are the ones saying that we devs need to use ultra-complex build systems and gigantic libraries to make a "real app". It's the gaslighting of saying simple architectures "won't ever work" mixed with machismo of "real programmers do X".

Sure, if you want the complexity that comes with using those "must-use" libraries, feel free to have it. I won't say you're wrong by doing so. Maybe you REALLY need all 14 of them, although I doubt it. But please stop assuming that everyone is doing the same or has to. Nor try to deny the reality of me and lots of others getting things done without "14 must use libraries". Because that is the definition of gaslighting.

[mhoad]

You seem to be conflating your personal experience here with everything happening around you which as you rightly point out is absolutely filled with this ever moving target that is absolutely impenetrable to beginners.

The React ecosystem looks like the crypto / nft space to outsiders. Nobody seems to agree on anything, no two projects look alike, it’s just this endless loop of people reinventing the same core bits over and over again for the past ten years.

I’m happy for you that this hasn’t been you experience but don’t tell me that the React ecosystem is stable. The reputation of the React ecosystem for many years has famously been that it’s a house of cards.

[deckard1]

> we'd see the same problem everywhere at the same scale

we do. Every C app implements its own linked list or hash table library. The entire Scheme community is nothing but toy interpreters of various stages of completeness (you can tell a project is serious when they implement call/cc). How many game engines do you think exist? It's a meme that game devs like to spend more time on their pet game engine than actually making their game. How many ORMs do you think exist for <language-of-choice>? At least half a dozen. At least. For any given language. Python, Ruby, Go[1]. ORMs, in particular, seem to get created over and over again. Probably because they are trivial to implement and allows one to voice their opinions on SQL abstraction (bike shedding).

[1] https://github.com/d-tsuji/awesome-go-orms

[qudat]

The scale of the problem on FE is because if you want to work in the browser, you need to use JS. There's a diversity of engineers working on the FE and with them comes a diversity of ideas. People have different use cases in mind and build packages to satisfy those use cases.

There's nothing special about JS, but there is something special about being forced to use JS.

[chiefalchemist]

Agreed. But at the same time aren't there other things to address, to tackle.

This won't be popular: but tech self-proclaimes itself as innovative and then wastes time mucking around reinventing wheel after wheel after wheel.

Sure, the self-edu is helpful. Of course. But does that always have to a wheel we've seen before going down a road we've been down before?

Note: Not trolling or ranting. Just looking for new thoughts and ideas.

[ratww]

It really depends on what you mean by saying wheels are being "reinvented". Is it really wheel reinvention, or is it a small incremental evolution that fixes one pain point, but has to keep all other aspects the same?

In this same thread there is a comment about how this little code snippet "throws away backward compatibility, plus everything else".

New tech has to have backwards compatibility to even be taken serious by most people. But backwards compatibility requires not only reinventing the wheel, but also having it being on the exact same size and material as before so it fits where it was used.

The only way to satisfy both of the groups above is to evolve tech that already exists and implement new findings in already existing libraries, but that will also enrage a lot of people. An example: React Hooks.

[alophawen]

Not sure self-edu is true in the case of React.

Don't forget React is a Facebook product.

[lloydatkinson]

What a ridiculous hyperbolic comment in response to a question around why one particular library has a ton more development than any others in the same space.

[m00dy]

very well summarised :)

[GiorgioG]

React isn't a framework. In order to build an app, you have to cobble together a bunch of other libraries to use with it to build something meaningful.

As someone coming from an Angular shop, I started a new job a few months ago that uses React on the frontend. My main gripe so far is there is no one "way" to do X in a react-based app. For an enterprise with lots of developers, Angular seems like a better fit - unless you want to spend months coming up with standards. Angular has its own issues of course - it's much more rigid and has a steeper learning curve.

[lloydatkinson]

Are people still having this strawman argument over if react is a library or a framework? Would my argument have changed if I'd put "framework/library" in my comment? No.

[bryanrasmussen]

we need an onomatopoeic composite here, to stop the continuous arguments, maybe fribrary or lamework.

[recursive]

"lamework" feels like it perfectly captures my experience of writing react apps. I'd go with that one.

[bryanrasmussen]

I find React perfectly fine for writing SPAs, as long as what is being written is actually suited to being an SPA. Otherwise I find it as dreadful as any time you use a hammer to pound a screw in place.

[tomc1985]

"Framurary" is kind of fun. Though lamework also describes my experience with it

[Rafert]

Isn't that the gap the likes of Next.js are filling?

[a_wild_dandan]

React is a view library. It deliberately focused on doing one thing, and doing it well -- declaratively painting the view layer. It's not comparable to more general/monolithic frontend development solutions like Angular/Vue/etc. Those tools have far different scopes. So of course React doesn't prescribe routing, state management, project styling solutions, build bundling, or any other frequently lamented "missing" features. They're only omissions to folks misunderstanding React's use case.

Now there are solutions comparable to Vue/etc which use React -- Next.js, Create React App, etc. Comparisons, tradeoffs, and criticisms are totally fair there. Just don't blame React for churn in third party implementations of features outside of its purview.

As a side note, I love that React is so narrowly scoped. It lets the community build on, experiment with, and coalesce around amazing solutions to other big features outside of React's scope. That Darwinian approach has created broad front end solutions that to me are a joy to use compared to similarly featured frameworks like Angular.

[mhoad]

It doesn’t actually do it well and has been totally out of step with how modern browsers work for years now. It’s old and poorly made technology. The fact that it chose to do one thing and it can’t even get that right says a lot about it.

Sadly, for reasons that remain a mystery to me it’s one of those things like Apple or crypto where some of its loudest fans have decided to make it a part of their identity rather than a tool they enjoy using.

[ratww]

React actually does more than "one thing", and it does those things quite well, actually: First, it provides a relatively performant diffing mechanism that gives a happy medium between manual diffing and templating; it also provides reusable components that are easy to make, easy to maintain and are able to easily hold local data and have an ergonomic API; finally it also provides a sane of of passing data between layers.

Other frameworks have adopted some of those concepts in different ways, and it works quite well. Other technologies have other ways of solving the same problems, and they also work! Of course, it is absolutely not perfect and doesn't solve "all problems", but that's how mature technologies generally are.

Modern browsers have tried to provide a competing technology with WebComponents, but despite being native to the platform and embraced en masse not only by browser makers but by large companies, it hasn't taken off like React. Please take a time to reflect as to why something that is "there" isn't as widely used as something that requires a 50kb library to even start. And no, it's not a conspiracy, nor it is marketing. There are very good technical reasons for that.

About the "fans" part: please look at the mirror. You seem to be projecting a lot here. People use React and other similar libraries because it gets the job done. A lot of your posts seem to be about competing technologies, or are anti-Apple, or anti-something. Criticism is perfectly fine, but you're the one making hating something part of your identity and the projection is blurring your ability to empathise with what others are saying.

[hobofan]

> Why is routing, of all things, in such need of constant development?

Because requirements change. In the last few years there was a lot of churn in React due to the introduction of async rendering and server-side rendering, and React routers were strongly affected by both of those changes.