More importantly, I realized React is trying to tame Facebook level of problems and hence their design decision steams from those data points. I develop small/medium type of frontend apps which doesn't need to apply solutions developed for such a scale.
These days I'm using Hotwire[1] (Turbo + Stimulus) with fair amount of vanilla javascript libraries in my apps. Occasionally, when I need to develop a reactive piece of UI I reach out for Svelte[2]
I'm quite happy after making the move. My apps complexity has reduced drastically and there is huge boost in my overall productivity.
Step 2: Someone gets fed up with this writes a framework that "does things right" and is designed for "simplicity"
Step 3: People start loving the new tool because it is so much easier to work with.
Step 4: People start to do things the tool wasn't designed to do. They start making "minor feature enhancements" to the tool so that it can fit more use cases.
Alternative Step 4: Tool becomes "industry standard" so everyone starts using it because it is "the right way", regardless of whether or not it is a good fit.
Step 5: The new tool becomes massive and bloated and overwhelmed with too many features, configurations, and options.
Step 6: Return to step 1.
> The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Web 2.0 Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the great mountainous island of FANNG. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”
I have been doing Rails development for past 10 years now and I never faced a dilemma where the framework took a direction which isn't aligned with its core vision.
I have been just trying to find a similar tool for frontend where I don't have to keep rewriting the entire codebase.
As a result, Django left its users completely on their own, while Rails made choices that wouldn't last the test of time.
Given how chaotic the frontend ecosystems have been over the past decade, I'm not sure there was a "right" answer in hindsight.
I've never seen this before, but I'm stealing it!
It is almost as if people are not breaking their problems over the correct dimensions.
For people like me who are new to JS and use these sorts of discussion to determine which technologies I should adopt first, it's really just pointless noise in the channel.
The little I know about JS so far, I definitely know this joke is tired and played out.
Step 2: Get a better joke please?
If you define yourself by the technology you work with you aren't an engineer you're a technician.
Essentially, all these frameworks ARE part of a cycle that repeat, and in time we all start to see it. Most of them just iterate on previous concepts, with some core concepts going way back to the late 60s, 70s and 80s.
What remains the same is the underlying Javascript language itself, and more importantly, fundamental software engineering and computer science principles.
Learn the fundamentals, and they will help you learn every new framework and language more easily, and in more depth.
If you really just want to get a job using JavaScript, then you might be best off browsing job postings to see what kinds of companies are hiring for which frameworks, and go from there.
But if your goal is literally to learn JS and find the right tech stack for you, unfortunately there is no replacement for learning the basics, and then picking a framework that looks interesting, and building something in it to see if it clicks with you.
Strong agreement!
There's a saying in community organizing and activist circles that goes something like:
"Don't apply the solutions of the butterfly to the problems of the caterpillar."
Imho it's a really important consideration when thinking about scale of movements (and nonprofits... and any community initiative...). This is especially true when "professional" people are always coming in and confidently over-applying their learnings in corporations to thinking about activism (which often, though not always, has very different incentive structures and lifecycles).
I think about this parable often in regards how all these scaled tech companies end up stewarding the developer tools and therefore practices for everyone. And they tend to out-pace and out-broadcast other wonderful tools that could better serve the majority of developer niches.
In 5 years if no one else is using Hotwire then your code is obsolete, no?
I liked working in next.js in the past but my company was already talking about Nuxt.js when we hadnt even fully converted to next. Feels like jumping ships from a ship with some major flaws, but will continue to float for x+ years, onto a lifeboat that may or may not make it another 500 feet before sinking.
I think that's the opposite of what he is saying. Because React is updated and changes frequently, your code becomes obsolete unless you update to follow the latest changes. In theory, if everyone abandoned Hotwire, your code would never be obsolete or need changes, because Hotwire would never change. In reality, as browsers and web standards change, frameworks need updating.
That would be a bad thing if it meant that earlier best practices were no longer maintained. But that’s not true. Class components are still around. All official documentation continues to have class component examples and explanations (where it makes sense obviously…there isn’t any class component documentation under hooks, of course). And class components will likely still be around 5 years from now.
That said, learning how useEffect replaces lifecycle methods is pretty quick to pickup. As is useState.
The lesser known hooks are what are difficult for me to understand. useRef is pretty clear. useMemo? I'm not quite sure what it's for, but I imagine it's not too tough to figure out if I spend a bit of time learning & experimenting with it.
So, although I liked the simplicity of class components, functional ones aren't too bad. They bring in some additional complications, but with a bit of effort it seems to all be learnable to me.
I never used Svelte, but I feel that "develop a reactive piece of UI" is basically Stimulus' job description. Can you explain a scenario/task where Stimulus does so poorly, that you flip the switch and use Svelte instead?
It’s challenging though to keep supporting an API contract that you don’t believe in anymore. Or especially that you are causing you and others pain. I think sometimes maybe the thing to do is pass the baton and work on something else, but we also punish people for abandoning things. Like the author of Groovy, who hopped around from project to project and lost people.
The worst experience so far was for a general full stack role. They sent me a 3 page long PDF of job "requirements" which was a lot of fluff and implicit stuff. I get it... but I think that can be reserved for later. Not the best offer, seemed like they were disorganized in general, etc.
The best experience was for the best TC offer _and_ most relevant position for me... they sent over half a page that didn't waste a single character. Named a few frameworks but they had a crystal clear idea of what they needed. It was amazing, lol.
This has the advantage that when - inevitably - tool1 gets deprecated and tool2 arrives you'll have someone that can adapt and learn, and likely you'll also have someone who can teach.
Did you rewrite your entire app?
Class components were/are just fine.
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* I hate you UberTinyUltra.js you are too complicated.
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Sort of how AWS keeps mucking with Lambdas so that thier customers can keep doing it wrong and paying too much.
Or how doctors just give patients scips if they ask about a drug and it won't incur them any liability.
Over and over I have seen the world shout the praises of a new paradigm that solves a problem...except they totally misunderstand the concept and run in an unintended direction. No one can fight that momentum. So they don't. It happens with nearly everything in tech.
Then, for their next big major release, the big feature was adding configuration to make it even more powerful!
I haven't used them in a while so my memory might be hazy, but this is exactly the phenomenon you've described. I wonder if it's insecurity or trying to please the crowd that simple niche tools in the frontend end up being configurability behemoths. There's always a time in a JS library where someone decides to rewrite the whole thing and add plugin support, and that's the time that library goes to shit.
Over long enough time you get Webpack, with more knobs than the Linux kernel, and cycles back to a version that tries to be smart and not require any configuration anymore, like 1.0 did.
God it drives me nuts that the language will allow you to spread a class into an object and it will take the properties but not the methods.
[0]https://raganwald.com/2016/07/20/prefer-composition-to-inher...
Per https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-intro.html , the primary motivations were:
- "It’s hard to reuse stateful logic between components "
- "Complex components become hard to understand"
- "Classes confuse both people and machines" (remembering how `this` works, code minification, method binding, etc)
There's also an excellent "Why React Hooks?" post at https://ui.dev/why-react-hooks that gives background details.
Additionally, the React team has talked about how hooks and function components allow them to have "forks" of the component tree in various states of partial completion at a time, for use with Suspense and transition features. This works because closures capture data in a scope, whereas mutable class instances could have gotten changed and refer to a single `this` instance.
Hooks are better than HOCs, no this is better than managing this, and dependency arrays are better than if (this.props.fooBarBaz !== newProps.fooBarBaz || this.props.onFooBarBazChanged !== newProps.onFooBarBazChanged || …)
So `this.state` is hard to optimize?
> Hooks had nothing to do with v8 optimizations or `this.state`.
Huh? That's what you just said. The spec makes it hard to optimize. The JIT compiler can't infer enough about the shape of the data.
It's not about "optimization" in the sense of "how fast can the v8 interpreter execute lookups on the class instance" or anything like that.
It's about "when this function executes, what data does it see, and did any of those values get changed out from under it in a way that could potentially break the logic"?
You're just describing the semantics of functions versus classes, and the consideration has existed long before hooks came around for exactly the reasons you describe. This discussion has also existed long before JavaScript, React, or hooks existed obviously. It's secondary to the discussion because function components have existed for a long time.
None of what you're saying changes the fact that replacing classes and lifecycles with hooks was done despite the fact that 99.9% of the API users would never care about the performance implications of classes, while that is precisely why the React team made the change. JavaScript is plenty composable with classes and without nested useEffect calls, which is one of the most absurd foot gun APIs that I have seen released in my entire career.
I'm pretty deeply tied into the React ecosystem, and I honestly can't remember _ever_ seeing that mentioned as a justification.
If you can link me a reference with them saying that, I'd both be interested in reading it, but honestly surprised to see that stated at all.
It's also a bit funny that certain kinds of people can just brush off these things with some non-sequitur on a message board when there are almost always bigger things at play.
Ultimately hooks are probably the way they are for the same reason Redux is the way it was(pre RTK I suppose)..
I'd have to re-evaluate the current Android landscape because it's been a while, but I might still consider React Native only for that platform, because having RN smooth the rough edges off Android dev made it a lot more pleasant and quick, with far less time lost fighting the platform and working around/replacing bad 1st party stuff piecemeal. But maybe it's gotten better-enough in the last 4ish years that it's no longer tempting to drag in RN just to avoid native Android dev.
In general though, I just no longer default to advocating React for highly-interactive sites or "webapps", as I did for a while.
That said, the hooks model is far from perfect. They give you a lot of rope to hang yourself with and were badly introduced. Within weeks the internet was ablaze with terrible advice.
When so many people get it wrong, the library is to blame. And I wish hooks were as robust as Solid.js’ signals model.
Vue 3 also has hook now. But none of these defects in the article exist.
In vue.
To use some value in a effect, you just use it and it is tracked.
If you need to clear up your code. You cut some code into a useXxx function, and your reusable utility is done. You can use it everywhere now. You don't really need to specify dependency of whatever by yourself.
If you must manipulate a dom, you just manipulate it. It will work as long as you revert the change before vue want to update it again.(And vue do provide a hook for you to attach a handler when these happen)
These restrictions are added by the way react implements hook, but not hook themselves. Hooks are just more user friendly services (by allow the hook to attach to component instance without all the glue codes(addListener or whatever))
I’m even more impressed with the extended Vue ecosystem like Vite, Vitest.
Recently worked on migrating a large codebase over from a legacy solution to Vue 3 with composition API, it was a pretty enjoyable experience, especially with Pinia!
Though I'd say that the problem was that most component libraries/frameworks out there actually don't support Vue 3 well enough. Last I checked, only the following were viable with Vue 3:
- Ant Design
- Element Plus
- PrimeVue (went with this, also has icons and a layout solution; also alternatives available for React and Angular)
- Vuetify
- Quasar
- BootstrapVue
- Vue Material
- Buefy
- View UI
- Vuikit
- Chakra UI
From what I recall, quasar managed to update very quickly.
Vuetify is currently in Beta for Vue 3 as they went with a greenfield rewrite to deal with tech debt. I rolled it out to a production site recently and it works well.
BootstrapVue completely dropped the ball, despite the corporate sponsorships the original maintainers went missing for a whole year & bailed. It got new maintainers at the start of the year, but they've been delayed by current geopolitical events.
This is true, at least there now is Vue 3 support, just checked: https://quasar.dev/
Though I can't edit the original post anymore. Oh well, thanks for clearing that up.
For example. To make a mutex to prevent duplicate submit of form. You use need to declare a instance field and wraps the code that do the submit. That alone is 3 lines of code but don't even include error handling.
But now I sealed it into a one line hook
const wrap = useMutex()
const submit = wrap(async () = { … })
Someone actually did in a project once and that lead to render loops that were hard to debug or solve: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/modern-reac...
Instead of a clear message about what caused that loop and maybe a walkthrough of the last N iterations (which changes caused which logic to be triggered), the error message was just a vague and lazy error (even AngularJS errors were better back in the day, filling in details in the docs as URL parameters).
Then again, over the years I've formed the opinion that both approaches are bad, just in different ways. There is no silver bullet, just look at how even desktop software and UI solutions struggled to be workable throughout the decades, of course things won't be that much better in regards to front end.
However, Vue's approach to hooks seems refreshing: creating and nesting components still isn't as easy as in React, but getting things done feels a little bit less cryptic and not as confusing, especially with something like Pinia!
I also think the fear of verbosity in this post is why I can't take it too seriously. Solo maintaining a not-so-old Expo application which uses React Navigation, I constantly have to rewrite large sections of code due to constant refactorings to match whatever coding style is hot at the moment, as the 6 month deprecation deadline is constantly at my doorstep because I have bigger fish on my plate. SO answers being out of date isn't a problem because React is too old, it's a problem because of everyone wanting it to be shiny and new again, and React acquiescing to those demands.
The author does have a bit of a point with libraries, but I counter with Nessim Btesh's fantastic article regarding proper React style[^1]. In short, you shouldn't really be depending on libraries for production needs, just for prototyping.
[^1]: https://nesbtesh.medium.com/how-i-write-react-after-8-years-...
How so? There is nothing that a class-based component can do that a hook-based component can't (EDIT: Except for error boundaries). I'd go as far as to say class-based components are strictly inferior because they force you split your behavior logic across lifecycle methods and are not easily composable. I've been able to support much more complex behavior easily with hooks (e.g., connection management), that would have been a nightmare with class-based components.
We have reached a period of time where junior devs exist that did not cut their teeth on class components and have no idea of what the lifecycles are. They don't know how rendering works so they either throw up useless memoization everywhere or they don't bother to think of it.
The complexity of class components did not vanish. It was only swept under the rug. Take useEffect. It's overloaded to hell and back. It does too much and people continue to struggle with it. Another one, useRef. It's not really for refs, per se. You will end up using it for data other than refs because function instance variables aren't a thing. No one knows when to use useLayoutEffect or useCallback.
The fact of the matter is that it's not class components vs. hooks. It's that React's API sucks. It's always sucked. And it continues to suck.
And then it just stays fixed. You don't have to split up the logic across different lifecycle methods and remember to keep them in sync. They're consolidated into functions that can be trivially pulled out into their own hooks and reused.
React is definitely a more low-level framework that requires you to have some familiarity with how the scheduler works, and could benefit from a couple more built-in hooks. But the benefits are undeniable, they make writing and refactoring complex applications an absolute breeze. The fact that you can factor out some state-related behavior into a hook and trivially reuse it is incredible.
For example, take state. With hooks, you use useState. A very common pattern is to need to persist it in the URL to enable deep linking. You can literally just replace your useState call with useQueryParam from the use-query-params library [1] and have your component function identically. You just can't do that with class-based components.
That's not strictly true. You can implement "hooks" on top of a class based components. It's essentially the strategy pattern.
Great article, couldn't agree more with them.
Yes, seriously. Have you used it for more complex components? You can split your effects across multiple useEffects, and have a guarantee that they run completely independently of each other (especially since you know what their dependencies are). Compare that to lifecycle methods: you only have one per component. All your effects concerned with setup have to be piled into the same function, and their associated teardowns have to be elsewhere in another method. How do you audit a behavior's logic? How do you reuse that behavior in another component? It's not easy, and you can cause weird bugs depending on the order in which you run them.
Compare that to useEffect. Setup and teardown in the same function, which allows it to focus on just one behavior. And if you need to, it can be trivially pulled out into its own hook and reused across all your components.
For the cases when this is not possible, I agree, useEffect works better than classes lifecycle methods. But do you really want a system which caters to a small percent of use-cases at the expense of readability in others? And the improvement, to my eyes, is not that big anyway.
The hooks are my main gripe with React, but as the OP, I don't see a better alternative either - at least not one that would be worth a rewrite.
What am I using? What is the effect?
The effect.
> What is the effect?
The state-modifying (and thus side-effect-producing, or simply “effectful”) function passed as the first argument to useEffect.
Most of hooks could have been done incrementally on top of classes.
I also don't think this would be possible. Hooks are based on closures and injected state, which you can't do in a class since separate methods won't share the closure.
A lot of third party hooks are really good though, being able to hook a dependency rather than create higher order components saves a lot of time and is conceptually much easier.
Sure methods like componentDidMount are a mouthful but I found it much more explicit
Changing the core methodology of a project used by millions of developers at the time was extremely irresponsible. They basically made obsolete all React educational resources overnight. I'm sure people making money by producing React educational content were very happy about that though.
I'm currently working on a project with hundreds of reactive components shown at any given time (very extensive financial analytics/modeling collected from over 500 data sources and real-time updated). Async rendering is a godsend. Perhaps React isn't for you if you don't see the need.
https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...
What remains is React, Angular and Vue - and out of these React wins by a huge margin, also thanks to async rendering.
I'm looking forward having another look at the remaining libs in a few years.
Hooks just match the way the React runtime works. Classes are just way easier to do weird bad stuff with. I’m not sure I would ever choose React if it was still class based. I’d use Ember probably which gives you more with the class-oriented API. Without the simplified control flow of hooks, I don’t see what React even offers over Ember or Vue.
But here's the weirdness. useState knows whether it's already been called for a given component; this is how it tracks state. The first call returns the state (the initial value) and a setter. Subsequent calls -- occurring after the first render -- do not return these objects anew, but instead reach into a per-functional-component store and return the values that already exist there. Calling the setter doesn't set the state in the body; rather, it updates the value in the store, then triggers a re-render.
If you're wondering just how react knows how to match up calls to useState between renders, it doesn't really. It simply matches them up based on the order they're called in. For that reason, you have to always call exactly the same useState calls on each render -- no putting some in an if statement or a variable length for loop, otherwise they'll be out of sync.
There are a bunch of other "hooks" for use in functional components, but they all work basically the same way: place some data in the functional component's store, then set up re-render (which, again, just means calling the component's function again) to occur when certain data changes.
I've used React a lot, but only via Reagent in ClojureScript.
I think the JS people are being scammed.
Before at least I knew what was called on boostrap moments. Now everything is run as a side effect when any dependency change. My needs on checking if a prop or a dependency has changed hasn't evolved at all. I just have the core of my side effects on useEffect.
There’s not much of a cognitive difference between “defining a reagent component which uses ratoms and calls a pure function that derefs, updates or swaps them”, and “defining a react functional component that uses hooks”. It looks weird to have the “atoms” inside the render function instead of outside, and there are the aforementioned limitations (“the rules of hooks”), but it’s a compromise to get the feature into JS React in a consistent, performant manner.
I’d love to use CLJS/Reagent or even go full re-frame on our front-end codebase, but that’s a hard sell at my company since I’m the only dev who’s ever played with Clojure.
In fairness, the JS world has never had well engineered OOP GUI toolkits like you find in the desktop space. If you've never used JavaFX then ReactJS probably seems pretty magical. If you have, then, well ...
ClojureScript is a functional language.
Reagent is a ClojureScript wrapper over React.
Cljs + Reagent is AWESOME.
There is a JavaFX wrapper too, with a similar API.
The comment was in response to "that's bonkers". And that has been my reaction on learning stuff like React and derived frameworks. A lot of it looks like functions for the sake of it, when objects already solve those problems but became unfashionable.
No, I'm not kidding.
Unless something's fundamentally changed about the code since release, they even end up attached to an object representing the UI component, by the time the heart of React's runtime code considers them. It's some real Rube-Goldberg shit. I read the code because I read the announcement docs and was like "wait, it looks like they... but no, surely they didn't" but yeah, turns out, they did.
When pressed about it, be ready to be hit with, "You don't understand hooks".
I've used class components and I think hooks are much better than the monstrosity that the lifecycle methods would usually become.
Also defining functions inside other functions is very much the staple of functional programming.
Isn't the difference that JavaScript runtimes don't compile them away unlike functional runtimes?
function johnson() { johnson.state = {}; }
This is however shared state and the state will be reset whenever the function is called a second time. So what you normally do with a function is to pass the state via arguments and now the same function can work with different states. React could totally do this via props or as a second argument.
function Johnson(props, state) {}
Instead they changed the laws of functions so that a function can act different the first time it is called and also be called the first time multiple times if and when the function calls a functions that looks like JavaScript but follow different rules [1].
This is weird.
[1] https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-rules.html#only-call-hooks-at...
Class components just have more lines, more boilerplate, so they have a higher cognitive load. But when you have state, you have more complexity, you can't just wave your hand wave and make it go away. You need to take the complexity into account.
Hooks are trying to do hand waving. The thing is, once you get to non-trivial use cases, the handwaving stops working. You're better off thinking a lot about where you state lives in your component hierarchy, and then limit your state to where you really need it. Once you do that the overhead of class components doesn't really make that big a deal.
The same principle applies to almost everything in programming, the more thought you put into structure, the simpler you can make everything.
1. Self's prototypes support multiple delegation while JS objects only have one prototype (can be fixed with Proxies).
2. Javascript objects lack a universal clone method.
3. Self is entirely message based, while JS is property based.
React is built on components which are objects (both in a programming and GUI sense). Using OOP to describe them just makes so much more sense to me.
If you have that functionality in a class component, and want to share it with a new link component, then the React Class way is to create a "withHover" HOC and wrap your link component in it. withHover(LinkComponent) which will have the necessary variables and pass them as props to your LinkComponent which is "okay".
But what if you have like 5 of these little hooks? Your LinkComponent now needs to be wrapped in each (or them all wrapped into a single HOC) and has to accept the props for all of them. Or, if you're extending classes as you describe you now have class LinkComponent extends HoverClass, ClickClass, DataClass etc...
With functional components you have something like a "useHover" hook. It passes back the hover state and the "onMouseEnter" and "onMouseLeave" callbacks necessary for your link within the functional component itself. It doesn't have to expose props to it's HOC, so it's now self contained.
It seems the philosophy of react is to have a lot of "littler" discreet pieces of code be they components or hooks and not have to have a ton of dependencies between them. You tend to get better tests this way as well as it should make it easier for other devs as they don't have to know the whole system and can work on a more discreet bit.
I, personally, use function components pretty much exclusively these days. If the function gets too big with hooks I tend to just create a single hook from them, not because it's going to be shared but just to keep my code more manageable, the hooks create props and the components consume them.
To each their own. I don't seem to be frustrated by the problems many in this thread and the article share.
The arguments I’ve heard is that it is “cleaner”, “more understandable” or the OO style is preferred. Some developers feel uncomfortable with hook magic because it introduces a more niche programming concept than OO (e.g stateful functions). I don’t find these arguments compelling. What the React team managed to do was reproduce the same functionality as class components while decreasing the footguns associated with them.
1. https://reactjs.org/blog/2016/07/13/mixins-considered-harmfu...
I disliked hooks after first trying them on their release, and I hate them now.
I'm still bitter that a senior engineer didn't step in and prevent them from destroying the react ecosystem. I wonder if they were have been squashed if React was developed outside Facebook?
Has anyone branched that into its own thing yet?
Hooks have always seemed so weird. And turns out it's the same for many others.
Sure, it's often overkill and a functional component does the same thing with less code. Use a functional component in these cases. But if you're doing something more complicated then stop treating class components like the fucking devil. They have their place.