- said it was bad
- not provided any concrete details
> they've become unmaintainable when reaching a certain size
How?
Did you start getting lot of hard to replicate bugs?
Did you find authoring new components was made difficult by your heavy use of custom hooks that were actually not as generic as you thought when you wrote them?
Did you find 3rd-party hooks had bugs?
Did you find that useRef doesn't work like you think it does, and you can't mix and match useRef and useEffect? (ouch)
What kind components are you writing that you find hooks are such a bad fit for?
Be specific.
(I'm not saying hooks are perfect; I've had all of the issues I listed happen to me, but it's still quicker to implement new features on a medium sized web app using hooks than with components in my experience; I work on 3 apps, and only one of them still uses components, and it's the most annoying to make changes too, simply because for simple business components & forms, hooks seem to reduce the amount of boiler plate, and flat out, reduce the lines of code; less code -> faster changes. It's not always that simple (see bugs comment above), but mostly... it is, in my experience: ...HOWEVER, what you've done is just wave your hands vaguely and fail to actually say anything except you don't like hooks)
One of my favorite papers on it: https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...
How complex it is is not relevant unless it has a tangible impact.
eg. I use spark a lot. I don't really deeply understand how the DAG is translated into a distributed computation and the results are aggregated from the cluster.
It calculates things. It's fast. Sometimes I'm surprised by things that are slower than I expect. Oh well. Don't do lots of column renames. /shrug
It's a tradeoff.
Is the effort to understand the detail worth the benefit of doing so? Does not understanding it cause enough pain that it become prohibitive to develop using it?
Is it for spark? No. I really don't care how it's implemented. I don't even know scala. It works fine.
Is it for assembly? No. I don't care at all how my code is JIT'd to assembly / code. It just works.
It it for react hooks? I honestly haven't personally found it to be... but I don't write custom hooks much.
So, your experience with hooks might be different, and you may find the trade-off is more expensive if your case, because it tangibly causes, eg. bugs when you write your code.
...but you are quite wrong if you think that not understanding how something works is a fundamental obstacle to using it.
That is categorically false.
I would argue that it's far from proven that using complex systems necessarily causes the complexity of your system to balloon out of control... or that there is even a strong casual relationship between "mental model being complex to grasp" and the resulting complexity of the system.
> ...it's far from proven that using complex systems necessarily causes the complexity of your system to balloon...
All of sudden, the magic stops and you have to deal with a ream of obtuse stack traces, problems that completely smash your metal model of what's going on, and you end up in deep rabbit holes of stuff you don't want to get into at the worst possible time. That is a fundamental obstacle.
Thats the point: the mental model is irrelevant unless it causes bugs when you use it wrong.
Does it? Does it actually cause bugs?
Not, “in general”; You’re just doing the same thing again here and doing vague hand waving. What actual bugs? What types of bugs?
Be specific
(yes, it does cause bugs, but see how this conversation is pointless when you don’t provide any details? Right, now go read the first post in this thread.)
I've read a lot warnings about the pitfalls, and about hooks not doing what you think they are doing, but honestly, I haven't experience any of that, maybe because my use cases are so close to the documented ones, that I don't need to stretch the concept, and it just works as intended for me.
Could it be, that as with many other programming patterns, some developers are using it as a silver bullet, and trying to solve everything with hooks?
Otherwise I'm failing to understand, it would be useful to see examples as the mentioned above.
> Should I use Hooks, classes, or a mix of both? [0]
> When you’re ready, we’d encourage you to start trying Hooks in new components you write. [snip]
> Do Hooks cover all use cases for classes? [1]
> Our goal is for Hooks to cover all use cases for classes as soon as possible. [snip]
The answer about higher-order components is a little more nuanced but does say hooks should replace most of them:
> Do Hooks replace render props and higher-order components? [2]
> Often, render props and higher-order components render only a single child. We think Hooks are a simpler way to serve this use case. There is still a place for both patterns (for example, a virtual scroller component might have a renderItem prop, or a visual container component might have its own DOM structure). But in most cases, Hooks will be sufficient and can help reduce nesting in your tree.
Learning enough about the React lifecycle to make simple apps was a big task, but it felt like a bounded one for my purposes. Learnings hooks seems... strangely open-ended. There's a small set of built-in hooks that do certain things, and if I need more I'm supposed to build new hooks out of the old ones, and that's supposed to be it. Except that it isn't, because if that's all there was to it, people wouldn't be having difficulty. I just wish the rest of the story was sketched out and bounded for me in some way so I could know what I was getting into.
[0] https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-faq.html#should-i-use-hooks-classes-or-a-mix-of-both
[1] https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-faq.html#do-hooks-cover-all-use-cases-for-classes
[2] https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-faq.html#do-hooks-replace-render-props-and-higher-order-componentsI remember people having difficulty with callbacks, then with generators, then with promises, Obersavables... you get the point. There is always something new that tries to make 80% of the cases trivial with a new elegant syntax that hides a lot of complexity, and comes with that 20% of cases where it is harder to grasp.
On the one hand, they are nicely composable. You can make one hook call depend on another and you can easily build a lot of cool functionality thanks to this. On the other hand, you are no longer able to directly follow the flow of the code. Making a change to a series of hook calls can sometimes be scary to me as it can be hard to fully understand the cause-and-effect of that change.
On the one hand, you can hide a lot of complexity behind a simple `useSomething()` call, on the other hand the code inside `useSomething()` can be absolute horror, because all the stateful logic is handled through hooks. Any non-obvious use-case ends up being a mess of hook calls. If you only write the code once and never need to touch it again, `useSomething()` can be an amazing hook though. There are some hooks that I have written that I hope I (or anyone else) don't ever have to touch. I might just be a bad programmer though, or missing some obvious patterns.
TLDR: hooks work well, but they have downsides in terms of maintenance burden
Hooks are, at least as they're presented on the surface level, exceptionally functional, so shouldnt it be easier to directly follow the code? Just follow the function calls?
If you need to make such statements something is very wrong. Either your code or with the design patterns you're forced into by your framework/library
With hooks however, you can create self-contained custom hooks that group all the code of a feature in one separate file. It's much easier to test and to make sense of. It's also easier to make the hook more generic and re-usable when it becomes needed by other components.
I'm definitely not going back to class-based components as I find React hooks a lot easier to manage and maintain.
Sometimes when I read these comments I feel like I am using a completely different library.