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> A charitable explanation of Sara's tweet might be that, like with jQuery, it is becoming difficult to convince new developers that React may not be necessary for their next project.

That's fair.

> The other comparative downside of JQuery was that components started to rely on it as a shared library, which meant developers suddenly needed to do dependency management. That is (usually) a bad idea. React absolutely does have that problem as well - probably to an even worse degree than jQuery widgets ever did.

I totally agree with that, but I don't think you can use that as a knock against jQuery, react, or vue. I think developers, especially js developers with our love of pulling in external packages, have yet to find a great solution for dependency management.

> IMO Lodash went the right direction with this. A component or library can depend on Lodash, pull in just the functions that they use for a final build, and then nobody else in the entire dev toolchain needs to know or care. No risk of conflicting dependencies, build size stays low, etc...

I think lodash can work that way because most of its functions are small and self-contained. It's easy to just bundle in a few select functions when they functions are 100 lines max and don't need the rest of the library, but I don't think React or Vue could use a similar approach.

Who is going to want to use a dropdown component that has the entire React 15.3 lib bundled into it?

> Who is going to want to use a dropdown component that has the entire React 15.3 lib bundled into it?

And who would want a dropdown component that has its own little rendering framework inside when you are using React for that?

Maybe not for a dropdown component, but I built a calendar component that stood alone using preact and redux, and the final size was still smaller than most calendar components of similar complexity.

Yeah, Preact is great for standalone widgets

To clarify what I was talking about with dependencies, many jQuery widgets used jQuery as a global dependency. This is very different from just building a bloated library - I might prefer a small library that has fewer dependencies for performance reasons, but I can still use a large one without any engineering downsides.

The problem is if I need to manage the dependencies between multiple components - if there's a singleton dependency that multiple components are accessing. It's dangerous not because it's a dependency, but because the components consuming it may have different requirements or assumptions that conflict with each other, and I won't be able to fix those assumptions without forking the components.

This is where you would run into scenarios where somebody's widget was only jQuery 2.x compatible, and somebody else's wanted to add custom events that interfered with scroll direction or something... I still have horror stories about trying to debug that kind of crap.

Shared dependencies really seem like they should be a good idea, but unless you're willing to fork other people's code or your app is only going to have a very short lifespan they're usually more trouble then they're worth.

To be fair, I think jQuery eventually did go the same way as Lodash. I haven't checked in a while but I'm pretty sure that they now have a way to generate a custom build of jQuery to be locally scoped to whatever thing you're building.

It would be tough for Vue to go the same route (still much easier than React) but that just means that you should probably only use Vue for your own projects and should avoid importing 3rd-party components that rely on having it globally accessible.

> Who is going to want to use a dropdown component that has the entire React 15.3 lib bundled into it?

...Nobody? Which is why peer dependencies exist.

NPM/Yarn aren't perfect by any stretch, but maybe mind Chesterton's Fence and refrain from reflexively assuming the developers of them are idiots?

Peer dependencies are a very valuable tool, and I'm glad that they exist, but most developers should avoid them in most scenarios. If a package requires a peer dependency, it's probably not worth using. There are exceptions but... in general.

This has been reinforced over and over again throughout JS history. jQuery, Grunt, Gulp, Angular, Bootstrap, and eventually React will join that list as well. You almost always end up with the nightmare of having to do package management because widget A and widget B interfere with each other. This is the same exact reason why it's good practice to avoid defining JS variables in the global scope.

Peer dependencies are just global variables at the package level.

To be clear, the people who built NPM were not idiots. Node handles packaging really intelligently - via a node_modules folder. There was a lot of thought put into how to make this system flexible: for example, you can have a node_modules not just at your root, but even in subfolders. This allows you to have custom implementations of a dependency that's isolated to a single folder in your source code, and to easily check your implementation directly into your VC.

None of that is accidental - the Node developers learned from languages like Ruby and Python, where gems and packages would be installed globally to the system, not locally to your project. They wanted a system that got rid of the majority of peer dependencies.

Jump outside of the web world and you'll see the same trend in the broader software ecosystem as well. The big hotness around Linux packaging right now is Flatpack, which is mostly copying Node's strategy of bundling dependencies into the app and then de-duplicating them after installation. Docker is an even more extreme example of this trend.

Peer dependencies are sometimes useful, and they're an important concept. But people use them and abuse them too much. They sound like they should be a good idea, so developers often don't realize the downsides until after they've gotten bitten - and even then they often just assume they were using a bad library or something.

9 out of 10 times you should avoid them, and you should avoid frameworks that introduce them.

So, two things:

I'm sorry that you've gotten bitten because it's frustrating when it happens, but "if a package requires a peer dependency,it's probably not worth using" is some cargo-cult stuff. Anything that acts as a extension system (coded to an interface) should use the project it's extending as a peerDependency. They are not "global variables", they're interfaces. It's what you're writing against! If you end up in dependency hell because of them, that means your dependencies are not speaking to the same interface, and that means you need to resolve the problem. Which can suck, I guess, having to actually do some work as a programmer, but somehow I think we'll all muddle through. Because the alternative is to silently have different APIs that will later break because the extended system has changed, and that is rather worse than actually knowing what's going on in your system.

React is a system that exists to be extended. Peer dependencies exist to facilitate this. Understanding one's tools makes cargo-cult sweeping-statement fears about milquetoast stuff really just unnecessary.

Flatpak is whatever (it's fancy /opt, that's fine) but, "jumping outside the web world", I'll put on my platform-architecture-is-my-actual-real-job hat right now and point out that Docker, while certainly appropriate for some use cases, is, for example, happy to cost you money in production when your big ol' app (shouts to my 4GB-heap-before-taking-a-request Ruby clients) can't copy-on-write. (After all, each process is supposed to be isolated, right? I mean, that's what people think...) There are real drawbacks to this approach, it's orthogonal to actually writing code, and the analogy doesn't really hold besides.

There is not a huge fundamental difference between a global variable and a global interface. That doesn't mean that interfaces are bad, but it means you should minimize the number of globally accessible interfaces that you have, and where possible opt for local interfaces that are accessible only to the classes that are extending them.

In any case, peer dependencies are a heck of a lot more than just an interface. They're a shared implementation. That's way more dangerous.

You're looking at this from the perspective of "well, my peer dependency is the interface I've blessed." What I'm saying is that for any long-lived project you are inevitably going to get parts of your implementation, interface, and toolchain wrong. It is therefore in your best interest to optimize for small, encapsulated interfaces that will be easy to remove or change later.

Unless you're working on a trivial project, you likely do not know enough about your project to bless an interface. You almost definitely don't know enough about your project to guess in advance which interface future 3rd-party dependencies will be using. You absolutely don't know enough about your project to guess whether or not your dependencies can rely on an evergreen codebase rather than a static one that you test once and then leave unchanged for the entire component lifecycle.

It's OK if you think I'm wrong about that. I probably would not have agreed with this two years ago. And you could very well be right and in two years my opinion might flip again. All of this is just opinion me, I've gone out of my way to say that none of what I'm talking about is a universal rule - you are going to need to share at least some environment code with your dependencies.

But it's usually true. You don't need to join a cargo cart to understand that some ideas tend to be better than others on average. It's not that I don't understand my tools, it's that I understand that tools evolve.

> But it took a lot of work to convince people that it [JQuery] was unnecessary.

First it took about a decade of browser and ECMA very intensive development to actually make it unnecessary.

> it is becoming difficult to convince new developers that React may not be necessary for their next project.

Give it a decade for the web "components" to actually become composable and for inventive and useful native language built-in solutions to state management to happen before you start advocating people out of React. Until then telling people they might not need React is not a step forward but backward. Imagine people saying "you might not need jQuery" in times where IE reigned and browsers were wildly incompatible.

Being used to jQuery, I really see no reason not to use it in new projects. I could learn all the new native equivalents, and even then still ending up doing more work than if I'd been using jQuery, just to save a little bit of page load time and filesize, but it would almost certainly not be worth it.

Indeed. I occasionally write a webbased tool to deal with a specific task (say formatting some form of codec data, or a simple dashboard for a specific event, or a small config generator, or whatever), userbase is in the <10 users (not concurrent) range, I don't give a stuff about scaling. I care that the code is in a repo (git, svn, whatever), is versioned (deb, rpm, whatever), and deploys cleanly.

I could learn and use $latest_thing, and maybe it would be great. That will triple the time taken to develop, but whatever. However in a couple of years time when I come to need to write something else, $latest_thing will be old hat, and replaced by $shiny_and_new. Rather than having 10 years of nice simple code based on jquery, I get some based on Angular, some on React, some on Vue, some on Meteor, or whatever.

I'm not a programmer, I'm not a wireman, and I'm not a carpenter. I program in the same way I'll run a network cable or get a screwdriver out, it's a tool I can use to solve a specific task. I like tools that are the same, year in, year out.

That's not to say the latest frameworks aren't all great, if you're building something for a million users and want to take advantage of shiny new features that's great, but for those that aren't, there's still a place for boring old things in a large part of the computer industry.

Take a look at zepto (or another jquery-like library), add some feature detection for IE polyfills, and switch to using fetch for ajax calls. Unless you're using a lot of jQuery dependencies, you'll cut your download size by more than half for most browsers/users.

I'd never say don't use jQuery, and it does support some options for a minimal footprint, still there's smaller options that probably have all you need.

It irks me that Javascript didn't just adopt the best parts of JQuery.

There are still things you can only do with jQuery, I can't think of a better Swiss Army knife for small tasks.

For example, fetch() is built into browsers now but it doesn't have all the features of $.ajax()

it irks me to use common functions such as selectors and Ajax in jQuery that are much, much slower than their native counterparts

Yes that's really a great way of seeing it. Jquery kind of graduated to obsolescence as many of its useful features made it into core JS.

When querySelector and ES6 came about, I found myself not needing jquery by default.