When you factor in the learning curve of the usual tools that go with React like Flux/Redux, Webpack, Router and whatnot, the combined cognitive load becomes a lot.
Which of the dozens of CSS solutions should I use? Inline styles or not? Which of the dozens of Flux libraries? Isomorphic/universal or client side? If Isomorphic, Express or Koa? Does react-router work with the choices I've made? Webpack or Browserify? It goes on and on...
I love React, but the environment and best practices are unclear to say the least.
Just look at how many starter kits there are and how big they tend to be: http://andrewhfarmer.com/starter-project/
Can only imagine how many of the choices made are going to be deprecated in a couple months.
Edit: Heh, and now that I've read the article, I see they hit on this issue. :)
How many 'best practices' do you need? What about 'higher order components'? Use proptypes in development? 'Avoid local state'?
>constantly breaking changes
I call bullshit, what was the last breaking change? Every large release still supports the old deprecated syntax, but with warnings.
>Every tutorial before the last month is already outdated
That is a big exaggeration; I wouldn't advice anyone to use 'pre es6' tutorials, but the concepts still apply.
>everybody has a different way of setting up webpack / isomorphism / templating.
No they don't, maybe a small differences and what do you mean with 'templating'? It's not Angular.
> How many 'best practices' do you need?
Actually, there should only be one way to do something in a framework. While not a framework, think about the Go language. Go is a very strict, almost paternal language that 'enforces' best practices in the language itself by giving you only one way to do something. Angular, on the other hand, provides numerous ways to create a service. Because of this confusion, the Angular team provides best practices. It's like saying, 'we screwed up in designing this thing, so you have to read all the documentation to find out the subtle differences in all this bullshit.' It's not the lack of best practices that concerns me, it's the abundance of them that gets shipped with a bloated framework that wasn't designed well.
>Every large release?I seriously doubt it.
Think of all the pain involved in removing all of the digest cycle code when switching from Angular 1.4 to Angular 2.0.
> No they don't, maybe a small differences and what do you mean with 'templating'? It's not Angular.
Seriously? There are no small differences between Django templates, Soy templates (client and server side), and Angular templates to name a few. They are all very different yet they do essentially the same thing. At least Soy templates can be used outside of a framework (with either JS or Java).
Browserify/Webpack is a giant pain and my least favorite part of this programming environment, but I'm not clear what it has to do with React. Is the concern here that React is packaged in such a way that you can't use it with a simple script inclusion, and that you must use a bundling system?
Router libraries are even less essential to React than Flux. I've never used one.
[1] Ultimately probably insignificant, overall.