Re:Algebraic Effects for React Developers
by hackerfromthefu on Monday November 02, 2020 @12:16PM
(#24970488)
I completely understand what you mean about not upgrading things in the working ecosystem, it's the pragmatic choice in the short term.
But then the churn in the interdependent platform and packages means your project is moving towards a state that it cannot be upgraded without significant risk and rewriting around the deprecated packages.
In my opinion this is a major issue with React in the landscape of businesses that have a halflife of more than a few years.. ie most long term businesses.
Yet despite the long term fragility and maintenance issues it's a topic that is missing in most discussions about React. The React conversations tend to be 'how can we keep up with the latest churn' instead of recognising the churn itself is a problem and stability provides realworld business value in the medium and long term.
This highlights one of the biggest issues with React: usually it works really well, but if you're unlucky enough that it doesn't then there's almost no way to work out why. I've been developing with React for about 4 years and I just don't upgrade things in the ecosystem unless I absolutely have to, because debugging the tooling is a massive pain.
This is also why it's very unhelpful to say that it works. Yes, it usually does, but not always and failing to understand that comes across as somewhat antagonistic.