[qudat]

view = func(state).

That’s the magic of react. The problem is no longer manually managing transitions between state but state itself.

That’s why state management is so critical in the react ecosystem.

Further, react has delegated two key features to userland: side effect and state management.

Personally, I don’t want react to solve either of these problems because it’ll just turn into the disaster that is react server components: feature development driven by corporate interests (eg vercel).

[recursive]

> view = func(state).

If this was actually how it worked, I'd have much less problem with react. What I mean, specifically, is that not all function dependencies are explicit. This makes it look like the state is passed into some function. And then the view is returned, depending only on state. In reality, half the state is passed in (as in the argument to a function call), and half comes out of some mysterious hook storage structure. If the state was really a function argument, you could easily inspect the whole state in a debugger. Instead of... I'm not sure how you'd actually do that.

[jbritton]

This brings up other questions too. Is the state on the client? How does one reconcile the server state and the client state. Is the client state a subset of server state? Is the client state a tree matching the view tree? Does the state contain only the UI data to be rendered or is it all app state.

[laurencerowe]

React Developer Tools makes it easy to inspect component state in your browser. https://react.dev/learn/react-developer-tools

[switz]

> it’ll just turn into the disaster that is react server components: feature development driven by corporate interests (eg vercel)

if you've followed along with the react team's discussions on server components, it is very clear that vercel implemented the react team's vision and less so the other way around.

as someone who has been using them extensively, I understand why. they're delightful.

vercel does control next.js which is the only framework to completely implement RSC, but as other frameworks catch up, RSC will have a wider surface area.

[june_twenty]

I think that view = func(state) is an unnecessary complicated way to describe frontend development.

[qudat]

After years of react dev that is probably one of the wildest takes I’ve ever read. Kudos!

[june_twenty]

Hardly a wild take though, is it? You're in the context of "I am mostly self-taught (and not even the best 'student' in that context, haha) so I'm sure I just lack the overall knowledge base/big-picture understanding" and you come in and say view = func(state).

Here's how the React docs introduce it:

"React is a JavaScript library for rendering user interfaces (UI). UI is built from small units like buttons, text, and images. React lets you combine them into reusable, nestable components."

Hopefully you can appreciate the difference.