[whalesalad]

Why does it feel like React (not just the lib but the community/ecosystem/everything) took something as straightforward and easy to understand as functional programming and surrounded it with so much fluffy pomp and circumstance that it is unrecognizable?

[ketzo]

The answer -- as it is with every version of "why is this JS so complicated?" -- is that frontend web dev:

- is the default way that most humans interact with computers

- is an extraordinarily broad problem space and solution space

- is something that basically every modern software company needs to do in some capacity, and with even a few developers, abstractions become desirable

I'm not saying there wasn't a better way for React to adopt FP principles. I certainly have my own gripes.

But to start a conversation with "why does the most widely adopted framework for the most broadly-used software interface in history have some rough edges?" seems, to me, to be sort of begging the question.

[hombre_fatal]

Because (1) UI app development isn't simple, so there are many ways to cook the egg, and (2) React isn't opinionated, so there are a lot of competing options, and it has quite a large surface area of use-cases.