[j0rd72]

I find myself agreeing with the article (although I also agree that it assumes you've chosen an SPA when you shouldn't have). To add my own perspective:

I work on an app, the front-end of which essentially consists of 6 nav tabs, 3 of which show an index of records with corresponding add/edit forms. We don't have any hyper-fancy interactive components that would require heavy JS libraries. And yet... we develop in React.

Yesterday, I needed to add 1 new field (representing by a checkbox input) to both our app and a corresponding back-end application we have, which uses Rails views.

I checked the git logs after to see how long each took. The Rails view took me literally 2 minutes to update (add field to model, add field to controller, add input to HAML with a class on the parent div). The React view took me 52 minutes, plus I later found out that I'd forgotten a damn type on some interface that's a shallow copy of our model.

Is this a problem with React itself? Not really. But it's a problem in the way that it's used, and our 6 nav tabs and 3 forms don't need all the overhead of React. So for people in a similar situation, this article really rings true.

[cnasc]

> We don't have any hyper-fancy interactive components that would require heavy JS libraries. And yet... we develop in React.

Is React really a "heavy" library? https://bundlephobia.com/package/react@19.1.0

> The React view took me 52 minutes, plus I later found out that I'd forgotten a damn type on some interface that's a shallow copy of our model.

This sounds like bad architecture, nothing about React would necessitate this. And if your typechecker isn't catching missing types, then it sounds like your types aren't adding much value.

[mosselman]

Whenever someone presents an anecdote like this, there is always someone who says “but then you are doing react wrong”.

Ok, so why is it possible to do it so wrong so often then? That sounds like a downside of the tool. It is a sharp knife. That doesn’t mean there is no place for react, but it also doesn’t mean we have to wipe it under the rug and pretend like it is everybody else’s fault.

I never read a story about it taking an hour to add a field to a form in Rails and it only taking 2 minutes in react. I’ve experienced the other way around for years though. So there is some truth to it. Let’s embrace the truth and look for what react brings us despite this.

[nymanjon]

I'm working on a React code base that literally uses over 100 lines of code to navigate to the next page. It also takes about 20 lines of code to have a link. It seems like React devs have never programmed outside of React.

I do like front end libs. I use them sometimes for the right context. But all the business apps I've worked on have never needed a front end lib. With web components even less so than before as the state based interactions that are local to that input element or some other element doesn't need a full blown framework.

My favorite front end lib right now is VanJS. It feels like writing straight vanilla JS without the cruft of writing actual vanilla JS. HTMX is good too, if you are working with back end state but need a little more smooth interaction. Of course, Datastar, html-form, etc all work too.

[cnasc]

> “but then you are doing react wrong”

My objection is not that they are doing React wrong, it’s that their complaint is incoherent because there is literally nothing about React that could make this task take an hour. React isn’t a form library. You write the markup for an html input element, if it’s a controlled input you have a trivial one-line change event handler, and you have a submit event handler. Any additional complexity here isn’t coming from React, and managing to overcomplicate such a basic thing and misidentify the source of the complexity absolutely speaks to a skill issue.

This is especially funny in a thread where posters hold up Rails as a paragon of quality and efficiency.

[nymanjon]

It took me an hour to add a link to the page because I had to learn about how the React Router works and learn how to set it up for the page I was on. With HTML it takes a couple of minutes, no need to set up props, pull in a library. I just create the link and the anchor tag and bam! Just like that I'm done!

[dinfinity]

> Is this a problem with React itself?

React is far from the best tool for most jobs (if any), but it has a shitload of inertia.

I can highly recommend looking into Lit (used to be Polymer): https://lit.dev/docs/

IMHO it allows just the right amount of encapsulation and structure, whilst building on W3C web components and being highly interoperable with other javascript libraries/vanilla code. It's pretty much what web components should be out of the box.

[wredcoll]

People absolutely use technologies poorly and make things harder than they should be.

At the same time, the part of the program that interfaces with the physical world (e.g., people) is always going to be far more complex and thus harder than the bits that get to live entirely inside the computer world.

[sensanaty]

I'm sorry but that just sounds like a tooling and skill issue? Adding a new form field takes me a grand total of 5 minutes in the Vue app I maintain at work, and I'm a mostly backend focused fullstacker. We have the form/input components, adding a new field to a type is trivial (and we generate those automatically based on our BE schema anyway), error handling is handled by our form/input components.

Also, I'm not the biggest fan of React and think there are options that are a million times better like Vue & Svelte, but React is not heavy. Yes, JS frontends pull in a lot of libraries, but React (or any other framework except for probably Angular and Ember) is far from being the biggest or heaviest dependency in any project. In fact, especially React does this amazingly, React itself has 0 external dependencies. Usually people will also want react-dom, so for the simplest possible application, that's a grand total of 2 very lightweight dependencies, and for usecases like yours of a few forms, that's literally all you'd need.

Sure, maybe your 3 forms don't need React, but it sounds like you're actively adding stuff to it (and even caught a type issue from the sound of it). The non React version of this work would've entailed targeting a querySelector's inner `.value` key, and then having to parse it if it's not a simple string and safe guard against the element not being there, or targeting a shifting ID or class or all the other numerous and tedious problems that arise. Or, you stick a `v-model` on it, send it as JSON and call it a day, I categorically refuse to pretend the old universe pre-SPA frameworks was in any way a good way of working.

[thefreeman]

Just because you are comfortable with one technology and inexperienced or unfamiliar with another does not make one better than the other. How much rails have you written in your career? How much react?