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Comment by stupidcar | Hacker News Reader

Stuff like this is what puts me off React:

https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/03/29/react-v-16-3.html https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/06/07/you-probably-dont-need-d...

It's at v16, and they're still making major changes to the basic component lifecycle, deprecating things, and then almost immediately having to write articles to teach against anti-patterns that already arisen in the new APIs!

A programming model that is so unintuitive people still cannot use it right, even after so many years, does not seem like a great bet to me.

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I'm not sure if you actually have ever used React but every single major version update is non breaking. The topics discussed in the link provided are discussing how an internal library is being updated (Context API) and how these functions are being depreciated in version 17 (https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/03/27/update-on-async-renderin...). The above depreciations are functions that typically should not be used in a v16 React application anyway! Using them typically means there lies a bug in your props updating logic.

> I'm not sure if you actually have ever used React but every single major version update is non breaking.

That would be fine if they were making major releases every 2+ years, when you release a major version on average of 3 times a year it's incredibly unstable. A typical upgrade will be jumping several versions.

A major version change of React is different from a major version change in Angular. I upgraded several React apps of variying sizes from 14 to 17 over time and none of these upgrades took more than an hour.

Don't get confused by the version labeling scheme.

React has always opted for better performance even if that causes the API to be harder to use. This can be seen in how setState() behaves differently depending on when you call it, keys, and now getDerivedStateFromProps. I've been using React since its inception and just the other day I got stuck with a gotcha on keys I was not expecting. Not saying this is good or bad, it's just the approach React took.

The major problem is that with the introdu of progressive web apps, people found easy to implement mobile apps, at the cost of sweating many hours on following React API changes, instead of learning native platforms API. This applies also to who is using Electron instead of native API on desktop.

It continually amazes me the contortions people will put themselves through just to be able to keep writing Javascript.

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