Doesn’t programming in general have solutions that scale well, and solutions that don’t scale well? Would you rather not have people writing about their experiences because it “doesn’t fare well”?
We are just sharing some things that worked well for us, and some things that didn’t. Things that didn’t (mixins) will eventually be forgotten as we move away from those APIs. So it looks like progress to me, but maybe I misunderstand something.
>Also having to do manual performance optimizations using the framework is a hassle to application developers and can be a major pitfall
You don’t “have to” do those optimizations. We only use them in about one in twenty components. But they are handy, and having an option to speed up a component with a few lines is better than having no such option. What do you think?
>You don’t “have to” do those optimizations.
Sure, but it seems to be a trade off of complexity for user experience. It's just covering up a leaky abstraction.
Higher-order functions are extremely common and useful in all functional languages. In fact many people gave us the exact opposite feedback: React taught them many functional programming patterns that they later used elsewhere, both with and without JavaScript, not to say React.
>I wouldn't go so far as to say, never use mixins in JavaScript, for example.
This is not what the article says. There is a paragraph clarifying this specific point, as the sibling comment points out. And the article is sprinkled with “in React codebases” and “in our experience” for this very reason.
>Sure, but it seems to be a trade off of complexity for user experience.
I don’t understand what you mean. In most cases you don’t need to do anything, React is fast. When you have an especially complex tree (not very common), you can add three lines to a few files, and React is even faster. It is a tradeoff, and it is a pretty damn good tradeoff in my experience working on React apps. What am I missing?
Yes but higher order components as you call them, seem to be an abstraction that you would only use because the base unit of organization is a React component. I'm of the opinion that design patterns emerge due to deficiencies in the language or abstraction level, and that they can be avoided.
I don’t really see the issue here. “How do you parameterize Y by X?” “Create a function that takes X and returns Y.” Doesn’t really seem React-specific.
The unit of organization is indeed the component. Again, I’m not sure I understand why it being a first-class thing indicates a deficiency. By this logic, functions are deficient in JavaScript because you can pass a function to [].map(), or Promises are deficient because you can resolve() a Promise to another Promise.
I think the opposite is true. The abstractions are more powerful when they afford building higher level abstractions on top of them. Obviously you shouldn’t overuse this, just like you shouldn’t overuse higher order functions, but it’s a nice property to have.
I'm not talking about the what, but why would anyone think of using higher order functions to build user interfaces in the first place. It complicates the use case: building and mutating DOM Nodes.
>I think the opposite is true. The abstractions are more powerful when they afford building higher level abstractions on top of them.
And what may I ask requires so much power for building web front-ends?
Why are you using a higher order function to `[].filter()` an array? It complicates the use case: iterating over items.
>And what may I ask requires so much power for building web front-ends?
I don’t know what kind of apps you are building, but use cases for React at Facebook are very complex. You may create an Ads account and go through the ad campaign creation flow to see what I mean.
You use functions, right?
I can't think of a single design pattern used in React that isn't a highly common design pattern in any number of languages.
HOC's are just a React implementation of Higher-order Functions.
> I wouldn't go so far as to say, never use mixins in JavaScript, for example.
Neither did they...
This doesn’t mean that mixins themselves are bad. People successfully employ them in different languages and paradigms, including some functional languages... Nevertheless, we think that mixins are unnecessary and problematic in React codebases.
I've been using React for over 2 years now, and still refer back to that list when I feel like something isn't right.
Compare this to how people write React components, they all look pretty much the same no matter what application you are working on. Sure there has been some churn, but there are tons of helpful warnings when they have happened and the migrations are easy. The community is also on the same exact page when it comes to writing components.
Outside of components there's a lack of the same cohesiveness with competing architectures. But the good ideas are rising to the top and the bad ones are fizzling away. I don't see it as a bad thing.
However, to the point about style guide/anti-patterns: I guess we haven't been working in the same codebases.. I've worked on a handful of different projects and most have scope flying all of the place, with controllers and directives used interchangeably (not to mention factories/services/providers). But really my biggest gripe is the amount of logic that ends up in disparate HTML attributes. JSX is a much cleaner solution.
> There's One Way™ to do things correctly. Using anti-pattern "hacks" will work for a little bit, but in the long run come back to bite you as your software grows and scales.
This is true, but in the given context that this is not true in the Angular world, that is definitely false. Some of the things you've mentioned are considered known abuses/anti-patterns/etc.
I sometimes wish for an opinionated framework that's built around React and possibly Redux (that said, I have pretty strong opinions so there would have to be significant overlap)
That said, I never got deep enough into Angular to know whether React is better or worse in that respect.
They are part of the framework to allow developers not familiar with functional and declarative ways of doing things to get stuff done
I believe its part of the React team's long-term goal to educate framework adopters about the proper patterns and to slowly phase out these escape hatches.