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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

I recently started a new front-end-heavy project and ended up just using Angular 1 instead of React. The decider for me was the amount of tooling that React needs you to have in place just to get up and running.

React expects you to do your development on some flavor of Unix, and really doesn't have a sane plan for Windows, so you lose VS.NET and its huge productivity gains. And it needs tools upon tools upon tools to set up, whateverify, transpile and pack the files you write into something that can display in a browser. Again, this all seems to want to run from a Unix command line.

I want to edit some HTML and Javascript, then reload the browser and see my changes. Angular isn't perfect, but at least it lets me do my thing without adding a bunch of extra hoops.

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And it needs tools upon tools upon tools to set up, whateverify, transpile and pack the files you write into something that can display in a browser.

I think this was true six months ago but now there is create-react-app. You might want to try it out - you won't need to whateverify your code, you just need that one tool. Also it works on Windows.

https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app

I want to edit some HTML and Javascript, then reload the browser and see my changes.

With create-react-app the browser will know you've made a change, and reload for you ;-)

npm install -g create-react-app

The fun thing watching the new world of Javascript is that overtooling is so built in to everything that nobody even realizes how many tools they're using. You can't even install this thing until you have the standard pile of javascript tooling in place. And it never occurred to them to even mention how to get said pile set up.

Once set up, this still uses all the same stuff. It just removes a few steps to produce the Big Red Button you press to run it all.

This is the problem I have with all these "easy" setups and boilerplate projects. It doesn't matter how you set up your project, unless you do it wrong, it all comes down to a one liner in the end. All these things do is hide the complexity from you with the goal of being able to "get up and running quick", which I find fairly pointless for projects that are of a significant enough size that you're considering using React or Angular for them. You're much better off learning all the tools and understanding how your project works.

But then again, the thing about the overtooling is: I can't find anything in my React stack that is unnecessary or can be removed. And really, all it is is React, Redux and Webpack. I think the complexity of front-end Javascript development is blown a little bit out of proportion.

Ah well rather than being uncessary, theres' alternatives for all of those options.

React could be replaced with Preact or Inferno.

Redux could be replaced with MobX or RxJS.

Webpack could be replaced with JSPM.

Exactly. It's "Oh, you don't like all the tooling, let's hide it all so when something breaks you have no idea where to look! HA! Isn't this FUN!"

No thanks.

> With create-react-app the browser will know you've made a change, and reload for you ;-)

Isn't that hot reloading of components which they say is unsupported?

It actually refreshes the whole page it isn't hot reloading. It's more like live reloading (who page instead of pieces of the page).

I can not share your experience at all. We are using React with Typescript for our projects at work and we have all common systems present (Linux, Windows, Mac).

Our projects compile from Typescript to ES6 and then ES6 to ES5 through babel. All of that takes place in webpack, and it was pretty easy to setup. We also all use Visual Studio Code and it's a joy to work with.

If you use something like hjs-webpack it gives you (hot-)reloading for code changes out of the box.

Visual Studio has task runner explorer now as well, it's easy to setup command line tools to run automatically, either on project open or on build.

I despair these days at the ridiculous number of command line tools you need to run, but once you've completely wasted 2 or 3 days of your life on these pointless things, cut and pasting command lines from setup instructions that give no indication what any of the flags actually mean, you can forget about them.

There were days when you just had to run an installer and then you were good to go. Or just get the latest version of the tools (and by tools I mean actual tools with a GUI and everything, gasp!) That's obviously really untrendy now.

But yeah, you can set it all up in VS to deal with the insanity for you. Good thing too, as the ASP.Net team have been drinking heavily from the command line insanity kool-aid.

Do you really want to point and click around on everything all the time? Maybe read the documentation on what various flags mean when you decide to use something.

Yes, the mouse + GUI is a lot more usable to me than typing in a CLI. The command line is from when we had terminals.

And worse still, yes, that's the case for most people. Most people prefer using mice + GUIs. Why are we going back in time? Why can't we have tools that work as both GUIs and CLIs?

CLIs are great for automation (and keyboard obsessed users).

GUIs are great for discoverability and making it obvious to users what the 'normal' usage is.

It's absolute madness to go back to the days of CLIs.

I'd disagree here. All the most productive developers I know make heavy usage of the CLI, and some of them, including me, are even developing in it with tools like vim or Emacs.

Self-selecting a bit there... Productive developer!

Have you considered that part of the problem is the stack you use causes other people to be unproductive because it's not clear what all the tools you're using are doing?

> React expects you to do your development on some flavor of Unix, and really doesn't have a sane plan for Windows, so you lose VS.NET and its huge productivity gains.

I've done both React projects with Python and C# apis. React is perfectly usable in VS.NET - are you aware of the Task Runner Explorer - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2016/01/06/task-runn... - hooks whatever you want into the build cycle, watches etc - once I discovered that, everything just clicked into place.

Manually reload the page? No thanks, way too slow. Using React hot loader and can't go back.

This mirrors my experience with react native. Not only did you have the react tools, but all the android tools. The abstraction leaked for me at the hello world stage where one dependency changed but I had no idea what our where without learning the entire stack.

See RiotJS

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