[throwitaway1123]

> My point is that this sort of thing doesn't happen so lightly in other ecosystems.

React has been around for 10 years (almost 11 since we're a few days away from 2024). Many of the ecosystems you're holding up as the epitomes of stability have had their fare share of large scale changes in that same time frame. Remember go before generics, or Rust before async landed [1]? Elixir's Phoenix didn't even have its first commit when React was released [2].

> there is no equivalent of useContext for class components

Class components can still use context [3]. They obviously can't use the useContext hook, because class components aren't compatible with hooks, but that's kind of a tautology.

> you didn't have to use ReactHooks, but try using Apollo client or react-query without them now, or try finding any non-hooks documentation in general.

Library authors moved to hooks because sharing stateful logic was difficult before hooks. I never bought into the GraphQL hype train, but I remember there being a ton of verbose render props necessary to make GraphQL libraries like Apollo work before hooks. I don't think anyone really complained about data fetching libraries adopting hooks. You could argue that the react devs should have created the perfect library in 2013 complete with hooks, but I can forgive them for not having perfect foresight. Like I said, if an API changes occasionally over a decade I'm ok with it. Technology should be stable, not frozen.

[1] https://areweasyncyet.rs/

[2] https://groups.google.com/g/phoenix-talk/c/l8kIhc_LC7o

[3] https://legacy.reactjs.org/docs/context.html#classcontexttyp...

[spion]

You can't use more than one context in React classes

"React" has been around for 10 years but in practice its been 3.5 different frameworks

- the original

- the class version (still close enough to original)

- hooks version (largely a whole different concept and "compatible" only superficially while the rest of the ecosystem starts writing incompatible things)

- server components, and `use`, which monkey patch fetch and already broke half of the ecosystem.

And no, hooks are still far from perfect and are infact very unintuitive and awkward to pretty much anyone who hasn't used React.

Additionally, there were designs possible to evolve from class components, its just that the React team cared more about

- "innovation",

- "functional" aesthetic preferences

- enabling a DCE compiler

rather than compatibility and continuity

Example design that would prioritise compatibility and continuity while still enabling all the current features of hooks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192312

Again, this is _not enough_ attention to backward compatibility and stability in other ecosystems, even older ones like Python.

[spion]

The problem isn't just react though. Most libraries in JS land just don't prioritise interfaces, compatibility and colaboration, instead opting for a "I'm just gonna build my own thing and not care about anything else out there" mentality.

Lets look at that Rust comparison and see how the equivalent situation looks like for JS. Before async-await, Rust had a variety of libraries implementing something close to Futures. They all largely standardized on the Future trait from the futures crate, which made it possible to write compatible library code that could build on top of any of them. There was a bit of an issue with compatibility as the trait essentially moved into std and some compatibility shims were needed, but after that a lot of the ecosystem adopted it and its possible to write runtime-independent code

In contrast in JS land, we had callbacks which were not even values, Promises (which had a working group that actually cared about compatibility), monadic Futures, observables, thunks, event-based interfaces, a variety of libraries. This came to be dominated with node-style callbacks, and then what got standardized were promises which instantly made most of the library ecosystem incompatible with the standardized syntax.

Both ecosystem have had these challenges, but to me it seems clear that the Rust community approached it with more care and thought on average.

Going beyond async-await, we can see similar patterns in the rest of the ecosystem. We have:

- half a dozen different component frameworks and not one has thought to define an compatible component interface that anyone could implement.

- 10 different popular libraries for manipulating standard library collections, but not one common protocol or trait (other than iterable and concatspreadable) that would make them largely work with other custom collections (e.g. MobX reactive collections or similar)

- 5 different popular bundlers and 10 older ones, but not one common trait, interface or standard for writing bundler plugins

- at a certain point, we had 3 different ways to define monorepo workspaces between npm, pnpm and yarn

So for a variety of reasons we have a very "internally incompatible" ecosystem. You can barely get components to work together, and what works together today is almost guaranteed to break tomorrow.

I think that if we recognize this is a problem collectively, there may be a way out. There is very high interest in some maintainers for doing this, especially those that care about compatibility. This is because one-sided care is not enough - the side you want to be compatible with has to care and prioritize it too. Those maintainers could decide to form a sub-community that prioritizes compatibility and continuity amongst them, as well as a promise to their users.

The recognition has to be more widespread than just in maintainers though, as frameworks that have done this before (e.g. Ember) have been largely left behind due to hype propping up the latest shiniest thing.

[throwitaway1123]

> "React" has been around for 10 years but in practice its been 3.5 different frameworks

> the class version (still close enough to original)

React.createClass existed because React is so old that not every browser supported native classes, and it was ditched when browser support improved. It was a relatively seamless transition. The rest of your bullet points are basically restating what we've already discussed. There have been two major changes in the past decade: hooks and server components. Again, I'm fine with two changes over the course of more than a decade.

To give you an example of a Go project that is roughly the same age as React and has introduced major breaking changes take a look at InfluxDB. It went from using SQL and InfluxQL as a query language in v1, to Flux in v2 as the headlining feature, then back to SQL and InfluxQL in version 3 recently [0].

> You can't use more than one context in React classes

You can, it just requires render props which are verbose (as I've already stated). There's a whole section of the legacy docs on this. This was one of the many motivations for the creation of hooks.

> 10 different popular libraries for manipulating standard library collections

Not really. Lodash is obviously the standard choice, and at one point Underscore had a bit of a following too. We wouldn't need these libraries if TC39 didn't drag its feet implementing the standard library, but browser technology has many stakeholders so it's a slow process.

> In contrast in JS land, we had callbacks which were not even values, Promises (which had a working group that actually cared about compatibility), monadic Futures, observables, thunks, event-based interfaces, a variety of libraries. This came to be dominated with node-style callbacks, and then what got standardized were promises which instantly made most of the library ecosystem incompatible with the standardized syntax.

I disagree with your characterization of async in JS. First of all you're tossing in a bunch of fringe concurrency techniques to distort history. There have been three mainstream ways of doing concurrency in the three or so decades that we've had JavaScript (in the following order). Callbacks (which is the primitive we were originally given from the browser and node emulated, e.g. addEventListener), promises (which have been standardized incredibly well, e.g. Bluebird promises still work after all these years), and async/await syntax which is a nice layer of syntactic sugar on top of promises that every language with promises eventually adopts.

Functional style monadic futures were never a mainstream way of doing things, to the point where people proposing them were told that they were living in fantasy land (which is why they literally created a library called fantasy land). Observables and thunks are not specific to JavaScript. RxJS (the most popular library for handling observables) has analogues in every popular programming language, and Reactive Extensions were actually originally created by Microsoft for C#.

> Example design that would prioritize compatibility and continuity while still enabling all the current features of hooks:

This is an HN comment you wrote with a small snippet of code. I would hesitate to call it a comprehensive design without peer review. You certainly could've submitted this during the RFC on hooks. There was a lengthy discussion before the design was finalized (which another commenter mentioned when you posted that comment to HN).

> Again, this is _not enough_ attention to backward compatibility and stability in other ecosystems, even older ones like Python.

Your definition of stability must be wildly different from mine then. Every time I have to install a python library on a new machine I audibly groan. There's a great article about this, and an associated discussion on HN and lobste.rs that I recommend [1][2][3]. Python is complex enough that it literally drove the adoption of Docker, because it was easier to ship an entire containerized OS than to instruct people on how to install Python packages.

This conversation is getting a bit lengthy, but I'll leave you with this:

- The most popular programming language on earth will inevitably explore the design space a lot, because there are so many people working with the language and thinking about these problems. As Bjarne Stroustrup said "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses".

- Older languages will inevitably have more cruft than newer ones, because design decisions tend to accrete over time.

- JS is in a particularly difficult position because it runs in both the browser and the server, and because it's built on web standards and TC39 uses design by committee (there's no BDFL supervising JS).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37614611

[1] https://www.bitecode.dev/p/why-not-tell-people-to-simply-use

[2] https://lobste.rs/s/vtghvu/why_not_tell_people_simply_use_py...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308241

[spion]

One last bit

> You certainly could've submitted this during the RFC on hooks. There was a lengthy discussion before the design was finalized (which another commenter mentioned when you posted that comment to HN).

There were RFCs submitted. My conclusion from that entire discussion was that the React team proceeded the way they've decided anyway without providing very convincing explanations and the priorities they had didn't align with most of the community. I believe this is in line with how other Facebook OSS works. React has largely been built with internal clients and their needs in mind. Additionally there seemed to be the desire to continue to be "iconclastic" and innovative and power through criticism in a similar manner that the initial React release did.

That's all perfectly fine, but in my opinion its not what the community needs, and we'de be better off moving on to other solutions (e.g. Solid, Svelte). But more important than that, we need to move on to a different mindset, because without that mindset change we're likely to go through the same problems over and over again.

[troupo]

There are very few projects, in Javascript or elsewhere, that care about backwards compatibility the way React does.

You can still easily put a class-based component inside your modern hook-based codebase, and it will work (I did it this year :) )

But I think they kinda dripped the ball with Suspense and server components

[spion]

This is not the definition of backward compatibility I have in mind. Backward compatibility also includes "continuity", that is the new features flow from previous design.

React has been redesigned 2 times and now with server components its even less of an extension of previous ways of doing things.

Building 3 different frameworks where the old way to write code still works but nobody builds on top of that in any meaningfully useful way is a very minimal definition of "backward compatibility"

[spion]

> I disagree with your characterization of async in JS. First of all you're tossing in a bunch of fringe concurrency techniques to distort history. There have been three mainstream ways of doing concurrency in the three or so decades that we've had JavaScript (in the following order). Callbacks (which is the primitive we were originally given from the browser and node emulated, e.g. addEventListener), promises (which have been standardized incredibly well, e.g. Bluebird promises still work after all these years), and async/await syntax which is a nice layer of syntactic sugar on top of promises that every language with promises eventually adopts.

I am (was) one of the maintainers of Bluebird. I'm well aware of the exact state of the node-dominated ecosystem at the time. Promises weren't much more popular than the "fringe" libraries you're describing, and (err, res) style callbacks largely dominated in the ecosystem. And yet it didn't matter - promises got standardized, even though the node community largely disliked them. Very different from the Rust process.

> Your definition of stability must be wildly different from mine then. Every time I have to install a python library on a new machine I audibly groan.

I'm aware that the python packaging story sucks. However there is broad awareness and strong desire to fix this. There is standardization work to get the ecosystem into a state that is largely coherent. There is much less such desire in JS: the thought of coming up with a "standard component interface" for example (i.e. a cross-framework compatible way of writing components) would be met with ridicule. (Note that I don't mean web components - I mean a common interface in the "trait" sense)

The Python article you linked itself admits "expirienced people will know what to do, this is not for them". Well that's not the case in JS - its actually really easy to get a combination of tools that simply will never, ever work with each other, just because they weren't designed with any common interface or compatibility in mind - regardles of how experienced you are. For example, at some (relatively short) point in time around 2019/2020, react-native simply didn't work with pnpm, because it assumed that packages installed together will have access to the same node_modules, so some of the packages dind't have the correct dependencies listed; pnpm being strict dind't provide the unlisted ones, which mean react-native was broken. (Later pnpm added a mode just for this sort of brokenness, but these sort of limitations pop up all the time)

> JS is in a particularly difficult position because it runs in both the browser and the server, and because it's built on web standards and TC39 uses design by committee (there's no BDFL supervising JS).

There's been plenty of time to fix things. Its not just about the ability, its about the general attitude in the community and our priorities. Before things get better, we have to admit they're really bad, and that we need to focus more on compatibility, continuity and colaboration instead of ignoring them in the pursuit of the latest "innovative" idea.

[throwitaway1123]

> promises got standardized, even though the node community largely disliked them.

Node is a phenomenal project, but it doesn't dictate the entire direction of the language. I have a hard time chastising TC39 for standardizing promises simply because Node developers didn't like the way it affected their core dumps. Like I said, JS is in a unique position as a language that runs on the server and in the browser. There are lots of stakeholders and not everyone is going to be happy, but I personally prefer promises over the callback hell we had before.

Your comments on Python:

> I'm aware that the python packaging story sucks. However there is broad awareness and strong desire to fix this.

Your comments on JS:

> There's been plenty of time to fix things

Python is one of the oldest programming languages that most engineers will likely ever work with. It was released the same year as Linux. Hasn't Python had "plenty of time to fix things"?

> The Python article you linked itself admits "expirienced people will know what to do, this is not for them".

First of all, the actual quote is "The people that will understand it’s not for them will self-exclude from the recommendations, as they should, since they know what to do anyway." The article also says the following: "I could not tag this as being “for beginners”, because it is not that simple. I know veterans that still struggle with this stuff".

But besides that, why in the world should you have to be an experienced engineer to figure out how to download and run packages of code from the internet? This is table stakes for most languages. You want third party JS frameworks to form a working group to establish interoperability before you'll grant the JS ecosystem your blessing, and yet you'll accept Python generally being bad at packaging code. You'll excuse anything when you're evaluating your favorite languages, but you nitpick when it comes to JS.

> For example, at some (relatively short) point in time around 2019/2020, react-native simply didn't work with pnpm

So you'll accept that the general Python packaging story is bad right now and has been for decades, and your only retort is that for an admittedly short period of time 3 or 4 years ago a single package supposedly had a bug related to pnpm (the least popular package manager)? Meanwhile the Python community is still debating how to install packages locally in a folder [1].

You don't think you're maybe contorting yourself to make some of these arguments work?

[1] https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-582-python-local-packages-d...

[spion]

> You don't think you're maybe contorting yourself to make some of these arguments work?

First of all, I still prefer TypeScript to Python when it comes to language features. So no, I'm not defending my favorite language here - if anything, I'm "attacking" it.

Secondly, I don't really think in terms of defending favorite languages - they all come with strenghts and weaknesses and I think that its important to talk about and acknowledge both aspects even for languages we really enjoy. That's the only way for languages to move forward and improve.

That said, being embedded into an ecosystem for a long time makes us used to its strenghts and desensitised to its weaknesses. This in turn makes it harder for us to really see the ecosystem's standing compared to others.

I'm trying to provide a perspective as someone who has worked in the ecosystem for a long time and has recently started exploring other options.

Are JS package managers better than Python's? Certainly. If you took a sampling of various tools and libraries in Python, would you be far more likely to have them work together than a sampling of various tools in JS? Absolutely.

I'm a relative beginner to Python compared to JS/TS, but I had a chance to work with it more recently. I had no trouble dealing with pip, venvs and poetry. Yes, there were challenges and annoyances but at least it was possible to overcome them with sufficient knowledge. I agree though - Python has long ways to go to improve this.

However, if I compare this with my previous JS experience, its a different order of magnitude. No amount of knowledge would've made styled components work with next's app router - I simply had to start over and make different choices for my SSR framework and UI library (the alternative was to help with Mantine's migration away from Emotion). So what do I do with my other, already well-developed side project that uses Mantine and Next pages router? I can continue to use the pages router, but for how long? Who knows - its not like there is any kind of concept of LTS or even any kind of thought on that topic when it comes to Next.js anyway (e.g. https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/41906)

At the end of the day, IMO the main difference is attitude. There is broad acknowledgement in the Python community about their problems and they're considered important to solve. I don't see anything like that in JS - compatibility and providing continuity is just not something most authors want to think about. Innovation is (still) priority #1

I realize its hard to make a convincing statement about frequency/magnitude/probability/attitude though. Similar examples will exist across ecosystems. What kind of data would convince you that the situation in the JS ecosystem is bad enough that it warrants a priority shift in the community?