We did this cause it's the new hot thing. Makes sense.
"In converting Pinners’ profiles to React, we’ve seen consistent performance and engagement improvements. Performance and engagement metrics each have increased 20 percent."
Especially if the new thing is React...
And 2 years ago you could have said the same thing about Angular.
And now you can say it about React.
Are we to expect the next article from Pinterest about [angular 2, vue, elm, etc.] in two years time?
Apparently there's still a lot of room for improvement, and much as I'd love for things to settle down soon, I've been very happy that I'm not stuck with jQuery or Backbone as the only tools in my belt!
Not to nitpick, but React has been around since summer 2013, and Angular 1.0 was released on June 14, 2012, so these libraries have definitely existed for more than 3 years. That said, I think that plays even more to your point that there are 3+ years of positive changes to be gained from switching from Backbone to React.
As that's basically what you're saying.
What surprises me is that you're so uppity about 'defending' Backbone. Nobody is saying it's shit and anyone using it is an idiot. It's just that many of us prefer what came after. It warrants, at most, a discussion as to why this is the case, but I don't see how it's worth any kind of argument.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6328685
3 years ago, angular.
If a framework's only been around for a year, which means nothing serious has been written in it, how can you know its limitations? It's appropriateness for large code bases?
note: no affiliation with pinterest.
Apparently some developers cannot do math, salary-per-hour * effort-spent.
What would be the monetary cost of such decision versus the monetary cost of the one taken?
Which approach would achieve the same value of 20 percent improvement in perf and engagement with lower amount of money being spent?
As someone who used to work on large Backbone apps I agree that it's a huge drain on developer productivity -- hard to add features, hard to test, lack of standards, etc. Not to mention the recruiting problem: I would never accept a job offer to work on a Backbone app again.
In addition, it becomes harder to hire if the technology is too far behind. It often is an indicator that the company doesn't invest enough into engineering because they let their state fall into not up to date codebases. This results in vastly increased recruiting costs, time lost, and decreased quality of life for those who stay.
It's not as simple as a direct calculation. It's very misleading to assume that one can simply shift resources into product feature development and not necessarily incur tradeoffs.
I don't think Vue will replace React for this reason (it's much closer to old DOM-munging style) but if something does its much less of a big deal than going from Backbone->React.
The Chief Javascript Wheel-Reinventing Officer has asked around his fraternity and decided that it's a good idea.
No other major view libraries had successfully done that before React was released. I've used angular and ember as well - their view layers suck.
It means my team can write a UI once, test it once, and know with a high degree of certainty that it will work and continue to do so.