[mkhalil]

>> "Complexity is not inherent to web development"

>> "Hotwire is sort of vanilla rails and it enables you to create very modern experiences with content live updating through web sockets and it is basically a one liner to setup."

My point was that web development isn't complex, but the core is simple; but modern web development is.

Your "Hotwire is sort of vanilla rails" statement is a perfect example.

What you claim to be simple, is a big list of tooling, web-sockets included, integrated together. The end result is using it might be a "one-liner", but that doesn't mean it's simple. And that's OKAY. Because simplicity should be the standard; and adding things, like sockets for live updates, should be something you explicitly enable (with modern web-apis, its definitely simpler than it used to be, but that doesn't mean its simple)

[AstroBen]

This really is different. Hotwire is simple. You can read through the library's codebase and understand what it's doing fairly easily, and then when working with it the flow is straightforward. Good luck doing that with React

[creakingstairs]

> Good luck doing that with React

Data is sent to React by inertia/graphql/whatever and React renders it. It’s pretty straightforward.

Edit: I do love LiveView/HotWire/HTMX etc but honestly everything is a trade off and there are times just rendering a react component is less complex.

[ricardobeat]

“Just rendering a component” takes thousands of nested function calls, covering a million lines of code; it’s not possible for a person to read or understand the whole process unless they dedicate months to it.

[creakingstairs]

Sure it adds complexity, but isn't that what abstractions are for? We are talking about grokking how data flows in _a web app in Rails_. I wouldn't think usual workflow requires going into actual inner workings of React :p

[AstroBen]

Well React doesn't come by itself. You need a router, probably some way of managing shared state, bundling, compiling your TypeScript, and 7 other libraries

The more stuff you add on the harder everything is to understand, and the less stable your app becomes until suddenly you need specialists for every piece just to keep things chugging forward. Everything needs greasing and maintenance over time..

..and then in 4 years the React team decides "oh you know what the way Svelte is doing things is actually way better.. we'll need a re-write to integrate their ideas". Now what?

"that wouldn't happen! so many businesses depend on React!".. uh they have no obligation to make things compatible with whatever you've built. They're not working for you. What happened with AngularJS? Vue 2?

Hotwire is easy to understand (React "just renders it" is a massive oversimplification)

If Hotwire rewrites? I create a private fork and continue on. Who cares

If I want to tweak how Hotwire works cause it'll benefit my app specifically? I do it myself

I'm not against adding complexity.. but if you care at all about longevity and long-term productivity then adding React really needs a tonne more consideration than it gets

[creakingstairs]

I think we fundamentally agree that we want to be careful about adding complexity to a project. Funnily enough there have been many times where I really thought Hotwire equivalent would have cut down a lot of complexity. I've also actively looked at web components at work and for hobby projects to see if we could make/keep things simpler.

But maybe I'm biased because I've been working with React for a long time, I don't find it too daunting to manage dev tools around React. When React was young, I remember that there were _a lot_ of ecosystem churn but now it's more-or-less settled and I don't think it's too bad.

I don't know how Hotwire works that well as most of my experience is around Elixir's LiveView, but at least for LiveView, there is also quite a bit going on under the hood to make it performant for large lists and to handle error states gracefully. And I (maybe incorrectly) assume Hotwire is similar, so I feel like it may not be not as simple as you say. (Edit: it is simpler than React though!)

[lambdaone]

Once you give up any hope of understanding the inner workings of the frameworks you are using, you're no longer a programmer, you're a cargo cultist. Now compound this a dozen levels deep, with systems piled on systems built by people who don't understand the other systems they are building on top of, and you have the current mess.

[spoiler]

Every engineer in our industry is a Cargo cultist by that definition. Including experts. Where do you draw the line? I'm sure you have one, but your line is no less arbitrary than mine or someone elses.

[spoiler]

And you think slapping ActiveRecord to a Ruby class doesn't hide thousands of lines of code?

Do you need a truly holistic and in-depth understand of every piece you use? How in-depth does you understanding need to be to use ActiveRecord/ActionCable/etc? What about underlying libraries? Protocols? Engine internals?

Do you need an in depth and holistic understanding of React and all its dependencies to write () => <div>Razzle Dazzle</div>? Nah, surely not

[nine_k]

I don't think a typical React rendering call is even 100 calls deep. React itself adds maybe a dozen frames. Your components could be complicated, but likely they don't add more than another dozen or two. React is pretty efficient if you hold it right, and use for its intended purpose, that is, large and complex interactive UIs.

[ricardobeat]

The event handling alone is almost a hundred calls deep. Because a lot of the work is happening asynchronously, you won't see most of it when stepping through the debugger starting from a click handler for example, but try adding a breakpoint to the compiled JSX.

With fibers (React >16) and a couple commonly used hooks you'll easily hit a thousand high call stack.

[nine_k]

Do you mean that the async chains of something().then(somethingElse()).then(...), into which async/await code desugars, grow 1000 levels deep? I never encountered it, but, OTOH, I did not research this in particular. V8 very definitely does not produce a call stack out of it, but schedules every new Promise as a separate task. (A bit like a Lisp threading macro.)

So, what forms 1000 levels of nested calls? Is that anything specific to React? I'm very curious now!

[spoiler]

Most JSX expands to a single expression, but I guess you mean a single component? I'm not sure what controversial here. I've attached debuggers to React component many times

[vhcr]

You also have to take into account the browser and OS call stack.

[nine_k]

This does not change if you write pure Javascript that directly mutates DOM without calling any intermediate functions.

Given the speed of rendering that browsers achieve, I would say that their call stack during this is highly optimized. I don't see OS doing much at all besides sending the drawing buffers to the GPU.

[zelphirkalt]

And also, that with React you are not only buying into React, but also a JavaScript dependency manager/package manager. Be it NPM, or any other. Installing JS package itself already comes with its own problems. And then probably people buy into more stuff to install through that package manager. Some component library and a "router" here, some material style and a little library to wrap the root node with some styling provider or what it is called there, ... before you know it, a typical FE dev will have turned your stack into 80% React and related dependencies and the maintenance on that will continue to grow, as new features "can be solved sooo easily, by just adding another dependency" from the NPM/React world.