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Comment by sureaboutthis | Hacker News Reader

Jeez. Why does anyone do this to themselves? All the work by the javascript guy and then all the work by the server to produce simple HTML/CSS output.

I am positive someone will come here and make a claim of large, dynamic sites and reddit's favorite nonsense phrase about DRY but I am also positive more people learn React because online articles tell them to than a real need for them.

If one would spend all this time learning HTML/CSS/Javascript fundamentals, and how to properly use them, they would have the same questions I have after 14 years of doing this, for companies large and small, as to why anyone bothers with this, Angular, and all the others. It just makes no sense at all.

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If you've been in the industry for 14 years, know JS and CSS inside out, and still don't understand why anyone wants to use React... I think you're the one missing some understanding, not the people who choose to actually learn the framework in question.

No. Remember the repeated rise and fall of NoSQL, and the repeated rise and fall of mainframes/cloud, and everything else that's happening cyclical. Style-Attributes in HTML, CSS-in-JS, etc.

There's a coaching gap because of the high demand in dev roles. New talent freshly out of uni and coding bootcamps lacks basic concepts and has to go through all the same architectural pitfalls and relearn the same mistakes over and over again.

The longer you're in business, the more such cycles you see repeat.

I disagree, everything is much simpler without React. I'm actually working on writing a tutorial for creating structured code for dynamic content with vanilla JS. With Ecmascript 6, a lot of advanced concepts has become much simpler and easier to read.

> everything is much simpler without React

What's "everything"? Writing a mostly static webpage with a few moving bits? Yeah, sure. Building and maintaining a complex SPA on a team of 4+ developers? I'll take React any day.

I hope you'll submit it here when it's ready, I'd quite like to see a good "Stripped back modern JS" series.

Sounds like you're proposing a framework, just one that people write themselves. I'll be interested to read your piece though, I'm curious to know how ES6 makes things like state management simple.

This isn't react only, it's component approach in general, do you, after 14 years, really denounce component approach?

Are you saying one cannot use a "component approach" without React? That's like saying I'm denouncing cars cause I don't like Chevys.

Yeah you can totally reinvent your component system yourself, or you can just use React which is used in production on thousands of websites and big products with top-level support of hundreds of engineers.

Or we can use our own component system, which we created ourselves at least 10 years ago, and not use React at all.

When you are into programming, like we are, you think of these things long before some big company tells you what to do.

If you'd shared that system 10 years ago maybe we'd all be using that instead of React!

Where I work, we use React because it's easier to find new hires (because they want to work with React) and quicker to get them up to speed on a project (because they already know the framework).

It's also easier to integrate and extend any 3rd party components, as we're already familiar with the boilerplate.

I am into programming, like you are. I also would rather benefit from the thousands and thousands of developer hours that have gone into the react core, and not have to train every new team member on a crufty ten year old bespoke codebase. I do try to keep my external dependencies low, but core utilities are not worth rewriting from scratch.

sadly we aren't all as smart and worthy as you are, and don't have a decade old react-like hanging around. some of us even prefer the idea of using an open source library for the various benefits of doing so.

"more people learn React because online articles tell them to than a real need for them"

Yes, like with most software.

But I guess the average dev is better off with learning React/Vue/Angular than cobbling together its own thing

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