GitHub Stars !== Usage: React Is Still Blowing Vue and Angular Away

Yep, React seems to have been built from the beginning as a new foundation. It leveraged ES6 features just as they were coming out, so we got to learn a new way to write JavaScript and HTML at the same time.

That's a big one for me, particularly with the way I prefer to write all my React components: as stateless functional components (just a function that takes props as its only argument and returns some JSX). For adding state, lifecycle methods, etc. I'm using recompose, which is also generic enough that I could easily see myself reimplementing it for some future view library.

Could you elaborate on the different use cases for each? I don't know enough about vue to spot them myself

I agree, and Preact is fantastic! Not only is it very fast and light, but so is the community

What do you mean by virtue signaling, and how should they defend their choice without virtue signaling?

Is it possible that some just prefer to use something that feels closer to the W3C standards?

Or is the virtue signaling about it being a facebook project, with facebook being a threat to the open web? Angular is a google project, but I've heard some say that since Evan You used to work for google it's sort of like it's a google project, which I disagree with. The clear winner of the three for being independent of FAAMG is Vue. Angular at least has its own GitHub organization that makes it a bit less blatant of an ad for its corporate steward (remember io.js and the movement to get Node moved out of Joyent to a foundation?).

I don't see it as virtue-signaling but I do think there are three distinct JS communities, even if they overlap a lot, and sometimes they take swipes at each other. Maybe someone can point out more? The three I'm thinking of are 1) the classic webmaster group, aimed at building dynamic and interactive websites 2) the SPA group, making webapps, also extending into things like React-Native, but the web is just a delivery medium for their app 3) the backend group with Node, aiming at the types of things you'd otherwise have used PHP/Ruby/Python for.

The only bizarre thing is the HTML was ever separate from JavaScript in the first place.

JSX isn't really an abstraction over HTML, it's an abstraction over document.createElement and the other related DOM APIs. I always liked it because that's really what is happening, JS is causing HTML elements to be created via those APIs. We aren't feeding the browser html files for it to parse.

> the various debates around web components and shadow DOM isolation get sorted out.

They won’t. jQuery was a much simpler concept and basically a fluent wrapper around a lot of existing APIs.

11 years later none of the browser APIs are not nearly as easy to use or powerful as jQuery. (Did you know that querySelectorAll returns an object that, unlike jQuery, isn’t an array and doesn’t have the same APIs? They added frigging .forEach to it only a few years ago).

Components are a more complex concept. You need data binding, and virtual DOMs (to prevent out-of-order janky updates to the DOM), and templating, and a solution for both global and isolated CSS, and..., and..., and...

These issues won’t be solved in the next 50 years. And that’s the reason no one uses (or talks about) vanilla WebComponents. Everyone is using any of the dozens of wrappers or frameworks on top of them.

Edit: added missing not in not nearly as easy

that was how i felt too which was the same reason i disliked angular. but vue's templating syntax have turned out to be really enjoyable to use. it made me think how wrong i was of my initial impression of vue. you have to give it a try to understand it.

In Vue and Angular you only need to figure out how to mix Javascript-like expressions with HTML-like templating language:

    <ul id="example-1">
      <li v-for="item in items">
        {{ item.message }}
      </li>
    </ul>

Thus spoke the priest of the inquisition confronting heretics distracting from the one true way:)

I personally had a lot of trouble with React, I didn't care for it, it was too foreign, too invasive.

Vue on the other hand just clicked nicely and appeared a thing of simplicity and beauty.

But admittedly I'm a wanton sinner. Who also don't care for Facebook products no matter how great and open and popular they are.

Personally, I view it as a case of right-tool-for-the-job vs the-one-true-way.

The core of the matter boils down to one thing...everything on the web doesn't need to be an SPA because most things are open, check, close experiences.

For the things that don't need to be an SPA, where a server side app serving HTML is a significantly faster user experience and dropping in a small bit of JS here and there is the right approach...Vue makes sense. This is the same place that jQuery makes sense because it makes the goal simple.

For the places where you do need an SPA because the user is going to be opening your site/app and working within it for a while...absolutely...use React. If that's going to translate to a native application, even more so...use React.

The concern is that Single Page Apps with React are gaining the hammer-and-everything-is-a-nail experience...when really only a few things are nails and most things are actually screws.

Just pick the right tool for the job without all of the zealotry, like suggesting anything that is not react distracts people from using react.

It's grand pronouncements like that that epitomize amateurishness. I am so sick of seeing people complain about how things are being X years ago, as if old techniques somehow magically become invalid. Maybe they seem so bad because the practitioner sucked at that time.

React doesn't really respect separation of concerns, and it's rare to find an SPA (and now, desktop apps -- thanks Electron!) that isn't complete garbage. Disciplined approach with battle-tested techniques creates much higher-quality software, every time.

Also, "paradigm shift" is nonsense. The web is a platform -- fetishizing specific tools and techniques is foolish. There are many ways to skin a cat.

Sorry, I told the story out of order, we saw Angular and passed on it.

Also have no regrets or issues with React. Been 3 years now and I have no complaints or frustrations with my job anymore, compared to the horror of adding jQuery plugins.

Appreciate your comment, it sounds like Vue may be an easier option for you, if you don't want to write JavaScript. However, you should just learn JavaScript, even if you're doing nothing but designing components, will explain why.

I also came from jQuery (Backbone and jQuery was a popular duo, in fact using jQuery in everything was).

The way people wrote apps at one point basically was a stream of jQuery statements, $thing.add('something'), etc.. This created nothing but spaghetti code over time.

Now, we're using React to design extendable components that can be nested, or structured to add more functionality. Check out styled components below to see how much easier it is to combine CSS, HTML into JavaScript. Rebass is built on this as a minimal component library. I know this might be really advanced and you may not adopt any of this, I'm just showing you the latest in what we could be moving toward.

I don't think I would leave React unless JS/HTML/Browsers dramatically changed. The industry is too far into JavaScript code at this point to where I am concerned about job security.

Back to your original point, I don't think Vue would scale well for serious JavaScript heavy apps, so that's why I don't think it's fair to compare it with React, but that's not how it's being discussed, which is some sort of React killer.

[1] https://www.styled-components.com/ [2] https://github.com/jxnblk/rebass

> The people who find Vue appealing (myself included) come from the world of design and html+css markup and jQuery.

This is something I've noticed-- spot on. Vue seems popular to people coming from the direction of "augmenting their HTML", whereas React is appealing to me precisely because it's all JavaScript.

2008 is more similar to 2018 than it is to 1998. I will wager that 2028 more similar to 2018 than 2018 was to 2008.

Doesn't look like there's a future appearing where we strap on our Magic Leap and wave our hands around and suddenly single page apps appear.

I'm giving my opinion that React ecosystem will stay around for an absurd amount of time because unlike jQuery, the size of the community and usability of the tool scales really well. Maybe people said the same thing about Rails, or Motif, but I just feel like React is the end of the line for whatever we're doing here.

Just to note you can use render functions and write jsx in Vue :) https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/render-function.html

Also, in enterprise consultant built apps we often have to consider what kind of talent we're going to be able to get for that project. It's much easier to get Angular and React developers than Vue developers at the moment. That could certainly change in a year of course.

I have a couple projects that are getting a decent amount of stars recently and I'm looking at the stats for the last two weeks:

- One has 3750 unique visitors, and 680 stars in 2 weeks

- Another has 80 unique visitors, 20 stars in 2 weeks

You don't need babel if you don't use jsx (which for vue is the default). I've personally only used vue the way you would use jquery. Adding a full webpack/babel/npm stack with a build step and all would be too much work; I barely understand what webpack is in the first place.

We avoid Webpack/Parcel and NPM dependencies entirely. I understand that convenience wins for most people, but it comes with a cost. Dependencies are magically stitched together with limited developer insight, arbitrary 3rd party code can make it into your production bundle on a whim, and it is far from "optimized" output.

We use rollup[1] for our production bundle. We manage all 3rd party dependencies by source control. We don't need to rely on NPM for ES5/ES6/CommonJS/AMD/Modules - We have full control of each dependency to use the code that is most fit. Sometimes that is already checked-in by the author, sometimes we need to build it, sometimes we can use the modern ES6 code directly, sometimes we can remove duplicate polyfills already in our bundle.

It takes bit more discipline, but the extra security, optimal build, and peace of mind knowing how things work, are well worth the effort to us.

[1] https://rollupjs.org

> Discussing which tools work best is an important question in software development.

I completely agree, but would you write an article titled "Spoons still blowing away Forks in digging holes"?

> I expect within 2-3 years Vue and React will be on far more equal footing in terms of usage and jobs.

I don't think this is true, primarily because of the number of large companies getting behind React and contributing to the ecosystem. Also, the difference between Angular and React is much larger (IMO) than the difference between React and Vue, which means there is less incentive to move to Vue if you already know React because the latter is Good Enough™.

Good point. I guess we'd have to rely on Github publishing this data to get the full picture.

In usage, maybe. React is the "people are learning this instead of raw javascript" kind of default that jQuery became.

I hope it does the same thing that jQuery did, and that is essentially make itself unnecessary in a lot of ways. Take all the really good features of React and make them browser-native.

To a certain degree, this is already happening. Web components are inching closer every day.