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Comment by acemarke | Hacker News Reader

Well, _I_ am the author, _and_ a Redux maintainer, _and_ I've spent a ton of time discussing and using Redux :) I can legitimately say I'm _an_ expert on Redux, its implementation, and its use.

The original point of writing it is that I see many people complaining about things like "having to use action creators" and "having to edit many files", when Redux itself doesn't actually require you to do those things.

So yes, I guess you could say that I _am_ trying to enlighten people, because many of the complaints about Redux are being made out of an incomplete understanding of why it exists and what its intended use is. If people still don't like Redux after that, that's fine - I just want people to better understand why Redux usage patterns exist and clear up the misunderstandings.

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The problem with redux is actually the dev-tools (and the ecosystem that spawned from the middleware). the newbies get wowed by "time travel debugging" and want to copy/paste there way to the $$$profit.

Redux takes a simple concept, and turned it into something thats really hard to apply to the projects these people are writing; by reinventing words into a propriety language.... No one talks about about there state as a function of "reducers". And when they think they have their head around "actions" they realise that no, its not a 1-to-1 relationship with what the user is doing.

If redux didnt try and re-invent event-sourcing with its own "idomatic TAO way", it could of leveraged off the plethora of well written documentation on the subject.

Instead, Dan, thought he could improve event sourcing and make it palatable for the masses by -replacing "events" with "actions" [1] -making the state an anemic domain model[0] -persisting snapshots instead of an event log then adding on congnitive load by implementing a diffing algorithm for UI updates which requires specialised knowledge. [1]

[0] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/AnemicDomainModel.html

[1] https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html

The domain model is technically not anemic. It just uses more functional patterns. Using lenses/selectors to manipulate state instead of using OOP principles, as is common in FP languages. In the same groups talking about reducing an event log is fairly common too. Possibly more common would have been to call it "fold" I guess, but that's essentially a synonym.

As to your other point, you're right, and it is somewhat of an issue: Redux does work better when it's thought of as event sourcing. And it can (and IMO should) be used as one. When actions are nearly 1:1 with what is happening in the system, and you're simply doing a "fold" on the event log to then project it to a stateless UI, it works beautifully.

Another red flag on redux: recommended practice--query JSON over HTTP (likely backed by an RDBMS), renormalize the hierarchical data, and then reshape the renormalized data before passing to components.

Right?! and redux is a baby-monster comparing to Relay that demands developer to actually modify the server's graphQL API in order to comply with the odd requirements.

IMHO experts who want to help people differ from self-proclaimed gurus who want to enlighten people. David Robinson ( data scientist not a basketball player) is the example of the first type. Take a look at his blog. He does not make any pretentious title or something, yet his articles are truly enlightening and influence millions of people!

It's no real secret that the author is a sucker for attention. I've always kind of felt that it was the first goal, and that he happened to help people was kind of a nice side effect.

From spamming his links everywhere he can, to begging for upvotes on Twitter, going by posting stuff about how he got famous and constant bragging, it's not new.

This is utterly ridiculous. Mark is often found on, for example, the react subreddit helping out folk with redux problems, and it's not at all an efficient or practical way to gain a following. If he were focused on fame and glory, he'd do much better simply writing Medium articles to a large audience and spamming social media links.

These kind of comments are disappointing to read, especially when directed at someone sacrificing an awful lot of time helping others.

off-topic - I was always wondering if they have a life those heroes who spend enormous amount of time helping other people in reddit, stack overflow and github..

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