Well, if you want routing, you need a provider, and if you want to pass your store to a component, you need a container, and if you want to react to store change, you need a reducer, and if you want to make async action with your store...

There is an "-er" somewhere at every step.

You pass callbacks here and props there, and then reference them the other way around. And then you plug stuff in your componentWillReceiveProps, or is it in compomentWillMount or componentDefinitlyDidMountISwear ? But wait this is a new style class, so you have to call super(props) in constructor insteat of getInitialState unless you have a super Esx plugin but then remember that your onClick callback need to rebind this otherwise you'll get 'attributeOnThis' is undefined somewhere in your bundle and you'll have a fun time.

When you come from flask, Django or Ror, having to deal with such API feels like going back to before the 2000 bubbles, where corporates tried to port their knowledge to the Web.

It does not feel agile at all.

I'm sorry but a `reducer` isn't a 90s-era Java concept at all [0], and you don't actually need to use any of those other things. This is beyond ridiculous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fold_(higher-order_function)

No but writing HTML directly in your class is soooo late 90s like when we used to write Java Servlets!

All this has happened before. It will happen again

You write syntactic sugar <div className="foo">abc</div> to turn into React.createElement('div', {className:'foo'}, 'abc') which generates an object {...stuff, tag: 'div', attrs: {className: 'foo'}, children: 'abc'}. Your final object is then compared to the previous object and any differences are manually written to the DOM in an efficient order.

Hardly comparable to Java Servlets.

Try Clojurescript with Reagent or Reframe. The whole React pipeline of bits and pieces just goes away.

My biggest problem is "the complete stack." Which one? How many months will it be the blessed way of doing things?

As soon as I get some work outsourced, here it comes yet another build system and yet another complete stack I have to get expert at.

Javascript lacks a standard library (a mistake from the beginning) as well as standard tools (can't blame Netscape for this, but today we could totally come up with something more definitive.

There is no single blessed "complete stack" for React and there never will be. That is a feature, since it is a view library only.

It sounds like you're looking for a full framework, e.g. Angular or Ember.

If JavaScript had a standard library from the beginning we would be replacing it now because it wouldn't support Unicode or promises or async or whatever is coming next.

The stdlib can evolve with the W3C the same way the language evolves.

The w3c cannot break the web. Once something is in the language a certain way, it stays (technically, there have been a couple small breaking changes, but the fact that you don't hear about them speaks to their size and impact)

You mean we're stuck with the legacy stuff forever.

React was released in 2013. Redux was released in 2015. If you'd picked them then you've had a very long amount of time using the same tools.

I'd hardly call 4 and 2 years (respectively) a "very long time".

It is a very long time in js world of things

We don't have precognition. It is not safe to pick a brand new framework for an important project right away, we have to wait a bit first to make sure it is being maintained well.