React is becoming a black box

Re:React is becoming a black box by littlecranky67 on Thursday September 03, 2020 @11:45AM (#24365156)

  > has a lot of people working with it who have very little CS background

This and so much this. This applies to "frontend development" in general. I work as a contractor in the frontend space (Europe, no where near FAANG like companies) and very often I meet other "devs" that have basically become frontend "engineers" out of being a webdesigner - like you know, creating nice html templates for wordpress, having decent CSS and photoshop skills and later in their career started to copy-paste some jquery plugins into their template to get nice animated toggles and alike. It is very common in "frontend teams" that people started to get into JS out of webdesign, and have never actually programmed in any other language.

Another issue is even with people with a CS or another STEM background, they only get taught in the "traditional" OOP sphere on top of blocking thread environments. Those usually have a hard time wrapping their heads around higher order functions or async-based development (and to be fair, I also had a hard time when I first encountered it).

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Re:React is becoming a black box by tabtab on Thursday September 03, 2020 @12:53PM (#24366004)

Most rank-and-file development doesn't need async and HOF. If your framework does, it's either screwed up or for a special/rare niche. I've been in these debates many times, and when examples are given I can usually trace the "fault" down to the framework or limits of the language. I stand behind this claim.

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Re:React is becoming a black box by tonyarkles on Thursday September 03, 2020 @03:13PM (#24367630)

> I've been in these debates many times, and when examples are given I can usually trace the "fault" down to the framework or limits of the language.

I don't disagree, but my follow-up question with that statement is "ok, now what?"

If you've got a weak/inexperienced developer who's stuck in a framework where they have have to start grokking async/HOF/whatever to solve the problem they've encountered, where do they go from there? It's fine and good to blame the framework they're operating in to be shitty, but they a) didn't have the skills initially to make a solid decision about the framework to use, and b) are now likely stuck with it (unless they're going to do a rewrite with something else).

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Re:React is becoming a black box by tabtab on Thursday September 03, 2020 @04:23PM (#24368475)

I agree that our current tooling requires more "rocket science" than it should to do ordinary things. I'm not sure how to fix the entire industry, but the first step to solving a problem is admit there is one.

Early cars were hard to learn, drive, and maintain. Over time they got better via trial and error by manufacturers. The desktop IDE's of the early 90's were like this, but got better over time (until web ruined their market). However, the web is still stuck in 1903: simple things are esoteric. Perhaps because too many other things about "cars" keep changing? Something is wrong. CRUD web dev is a mess.

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Re:React is becoming a black box by littlecranky67 on Thursday September 03, 2020 @01:17PM (#24366273)

At least in browser-world, most APIs (i mean the ones defined by the web standards) are built around async/Promise/callbacks/HOF, like it or not. There is no switching to other languages/framework when targeting the browser as a runtime.

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Re:React is becoming a black box by tabtab on Thursday September 03, 2020 @04:10PM (#24368309)

This is largely because JavaScript has weak areas.

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Re:React is becoming a black box by andybak on Thursday September 03, 2020 @01:37PM (#24366481)

Crikey. Higher order functions are rare or niche?

To my mind they are oftentimes magic pixie dust that can turn a hideous, verbose and inflexible API into something humane and readable.

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Re:React is becoming a black box by tabtab on Thursday September 03, 2020 @04:11PM (#24368330)

Not quite what I said. I said they are not needed for rank and file application (domain-centric) development, IF the tooling and programming language are decent.

If you bring up a scenario, I can probably poke holes in it. Done it many times in many debates. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I keep winning THIS one for whatever reason.

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