The fundamental difference between React and Vue is vision. React bets on functional programming and moves closer to reaching its goal, perhaps shedding the last OOP parts some day.
Vue follows an older paradigm, Angulars basically, but with React underpinnings. It's heavily inspired by OO templating, pseudo code mixed into html. Perhaps the gravest difference if you come from React is that it encourages mutation, to an extent that now forces it to maintain two incompatible versions going forward due to IE11's lack of proxies.
In comparison, within 10 minutes of reading Vue “getting started” docs I had it up and running and everything just... made sense. I have been using it for a year and a half and haven’t looked back.
If you want to give it a go quickly, just load up https://flems.io/mithril .
Here's a quick hello world. https://flems.io/#0=N4IgZglgNgpgziAXAbVAOwIYFsZJAOgAsAXLKEAG...
Shame the site is one of the rather large group of sites that assume everyone's default CSS is black on white text, though.
(I work on React. Vue seems to make more sense to many people, and React to many others.)
On technical side, not much.
But there are much more to it than just technical stuff.
Angular was great for big, organized teams, with spec driven development.
Separation of concerns and work was also great - having junior devs concentrate on templates and to spec written directives, while seniors deal with something more arcane.
But further they went, the more dogmatism showed up, and more it felt that they are effectively trying to invent their own language. Remember the famous "you are not doing it the Angular way!"
A big benefit of Vue is that China and big money are on the Vue train now. In China, companies are reluctant to use React.
How come?
If next.js wasn't as nice as it appears to be, or nuxt was just as good, I wouldn't be looking at react for another project. The lack of plugins is "meh", the dev tools in React are pretty amazing. I haven't figured out a way to get a really nice stack trace in the browser for an error in Vue, react does this much better.
Experience in Vue (2.5 years and continued, 1 shipped SaaS, fairly large internal project) React (1.5 years off and on, big ecommerce furniture place)
what exactly do you mean? you didn't understand the templating language? you didn't understand the data model? you didn't understand webpack? what does "i didn't have the slightest clue what was going on" even mean? do you know what gcc does when it compiles your C code to assembly? is that the resolution at which you'd like to know "what's happening" ???
I guess with Vue I just don't feel in control any more, and that's a big no for me.
If you like jQuery, you should like vue. Cause, you can use vue just by adding a script tag in your web page.
You don't need command line, web pack or any other tool to use most of vue.
edit: Sorry. Didn't know I was replying to you.
If you're happy with React, by all means continue with it. If you want to understand Vue, then get simpler articles/videos and ignore the unnecessarily complicated ones.
https://unpkg.com/@arijs/vue-generator/outra/pagina/index.ht...
I understand your feeling, even though I don’t work in React.
I worked for a company that brought in a new guy who was all hung-ho on Vue as the new hotness. He managed to convince the project manager that we had to convert the entire site to Vue.
I was never able to wrap my brain around the fact that so much of it was opaque. You just had to trust that A would lead to B would lead to C. And when it didn’t, even the Vue evangelist couldn’t untangle it.
As I’ve explored more and more languages and frameworks over the years, some I immediately grok, and others just never make sense. I think some programmers, brains are just wired differently than others. It’s too bad that there’s this undercurrent of tribalism and brand loyalty in the industry.