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Comment by adriancooney | Hacker News Reader

I honestly believe this is the reason why React is currently winning the web tech wars. The API is minimal, clear and concise. Once you've mastered the few functions and concepts, you rarely have to reference the documentation and understand what tools you have to solve a problem. A major source of frustration with me as a programmer is implementing something only to find the library or framework I'm using has already included it in its core, it's just not in the documentation or hidden in a huge API reference. It's a refreshing experience when libraries and frameworks appreciate the product and the programmer.

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> I honestly believe this is the reason why React is currently winning the web tech wars.

On what are you basing that assertion? I'm primarily a back-end developer, so I'm not necessarily disputing it. However, every other recruiter who contacts me asks about Angular experience, whereas I have yet to encounter a single React job listing in the wild.

I do agree that React seems to get a bit more chatter and cheerleading on HN and Reddit recently... but I never know how much of that chatter is legit professional usage, versus what people are tinkering with in their personal side projects. If I took web forums at face value, I would be under the impression that Rust is taking over the enterprise right now.

Same holds true for functional programming & languages. If you believed that HN forums were a reflection of reality, you'd be shocked when you looked for Haskell jobs.

I can't necessarily agree with this, as while React itself is very simple, you will find that after sufficient experience with it in the real world, you need its ecosystem and surrounding libraries, and this can be absolutely daunting for some.

e.g. NPM, Webpack, Flux/Redux, React-Router, Thunk, DevTools, CSS, etc.

But compared to something like angular react is minimalist.

But compared to something like GWT, angular is minimalist :) Surely that doesn't mean we should all settle with angular, does it?

You really don't need those - React was popular far before any of those came about (well, except CSS). :)

Perhaps a good team lead / architect is helpful here to set things up and teach people who find these things hard how to use it, as well as build domain specific abstractions to simplify building apps? One example might be the Facebook UI Infrastructure team.

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