It's funny that memoization is some conceptual model for react but that's what compilers have been doing for ever and ever.
React isn't really inventing anything fundamentally new in terms of computer science but I think they are introducing a lot of people to good concepts that already existed.
Douglas Crockford was writing about it for JS [0] back in 2008 which is still a long way behind compilers and, say, Haskell but it has been used in JavaScript at least a decade.
[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3798858/explanation-on-j...