[wildermuthn]

Except for the non-dancing zoomers catching stray bullets at the end, this is a really great rant. He’s absolutely right that React won for very good reasons, reasons that new frameworks don’t seem to understand by making old mistakes (templates and directives, looking hard at you). But the rant goes deeper in its accusation that React (and the web) has forgotten the past as well. React (and the web in general) isn’t a great solution for data that is 1) real-time, 2) multi-user, and 3) contextually undo-able.

He’s not wrong, but I wonder what kind of applications he’s working on that require all three of those characteristics simultaneously. If you only need 2 out of his 3 data requirements, then React + Apollo can handle it just fine in experienced hands.

For apps that truly do need all 3 capabilities, the problem isn’t React per-se. The problem is that such apps are just complex by their very nature — even by reducing accidental complexity to zero, you are still stuck with a huge amount of essential complexity. That’s just the nature of the beast.

Although I have long since moved on from Clojure since Rich Hickey made it clear Clojure was not about me but about him and his consulting business, you really need a powerful language like Clojure to do something as tricky as the author wants poor little JS to do. Someone one described JS as a cute dog with three legs — you feel for it, and take care of it, but you know it really isn’t capable of too much. A hard problem needs a powerful tool, and nothing written in JS (kinda-typed or not) is going to get the job done.