| Did you work on any big backbone apps professionally? We had a huge one at Airbnb where after a certain scale any change by anyone - from new grad to expert - could get stuck in 2 days of debugging pure incidental complexity. Change some ui dom structure? Oops you broke someone’s selector and their event won’t fire anymore. Send an update at the wrong time? Render loop. Switching to React for that app (and everything else) was such a godsend. Once React landed in the codebase it spread like wildfire because of how eager everyone was to burn down the old way! To me the “it succeeded because marketing” rings hollow because my experience at the time was: - people loved their MVC ideas and “semantic makeup”, putting template in the JS was so WEIRD and ICKY. And no doubt the compile step for JSX still is annoying one-time complexity. Lots of resistance / thinking React was dumb. - then you hear about someone on another team replacing a small but annoying feature with React and how relieved they are to be out of backbone hell - you try yourself, it’s a weird new world and you struggle a bit with the new concepts. Hit a few sharp edges. - after a week and a half you can’t go back. - after 6 months (almost) everyone on every team wants to rewrite to React. (We had a few front end leads clinging to their Separation of Concerns as though changing class names on a node in backbone wouldn’t break a zillion event handlers) If definitely became The Way and self reenforcing, but in my mind that happened primarily out of merit. |