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Comment by danabramov | Hacker News Reader

But that’s not how it works. They don’t run during initialization, they run on every render. That’s their whole point and what makes them dynamic.

I tried to explain this here:

https://overreacted.io/why-do-hooks-rely-on-call-order/#flaw...

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Do you find it concerning that many software engineers with extensive professional React experience have such a difficult time understanding hooks?

Personally, I don't find it any more concerning that many software engineers with extensive professional web development experience had such a difficult time understanding React when it came out. (It was universally ridiculed and dismissed for about a year after it came out.)

It's a different mental model. It doesn't "click" immediately for everyone but I've seen it "click" enough times for both beginners and experienced developers that I'm not worried about it.

I don't really remember there being much of a misunderstanding of React itself when it was first launched. There was definitely ridicule ("markup and logic in the same file?!"), but the general idea behind the core of it is pretty straightforward. I could be misremembering, it has been several years after all.

And I'm optimistic that hooks will be great and they won't be difficult to teach to React newcomers and more junior team members. But it's not obvious to me yet that it's the case and I'll be careful about how I use the feature going forward

Thanks for all your contributions to the community, though. Not trying to be overly critical of all the hard work — just trying to fully understand use cases, maintainability implications, etc.

I would question the premise. I consider myself fairly plugged into the professional React community on Twitter, and I have several years of React experience myself, and my impression has not been that experienced React programmers have a difficult time understanding hooks.

Same. Most of the devs I know personally were immediately convinced and loved the API. I assume the usual feedback bias is at play here.

Folks who are into hooks probably talked to friends/coworkers excitedly about them, but have a lot less reason to broadcast their feelings about it than people who had complaints. I don't think any of the people I know who were into them did anything more than than thumbsup the RFC or like/retweet some tweets--if they even did anything public at all--even though we all followed the discussions. Personally I didn't want to add to the noise with a comment which would basically be "Yeah this looks fantastic, and all these alternative APIs being suggested seem clearly worse."

People who don't like hooks spent a lot of time writing about their issues with them and what they'd like to hear instead. I wish I could get that type of feedback on everything I wrote, I just wouldn't want to deal with that immense volume.

This is such an excellent point. I made a prototype of a class based alternative to hooks, and while I liked some aspects of the API more, it definitely did not take this use case into account!

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