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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

Glad to read that as the top comment, because when they came out, I expressed strong doubts about this new features, and I mostly received mad comments in return. The alienated react fans stated that I didn't understand what modern code was, what a great idea those were and how from now on, everything will be better.

Now hooks are certainly a technically interesting pattern. I can see why it can be desirable by some. But I can't shake the feeling it has too of a big potential for misuse and could add a lot of complexity to a react, a tool that already has a big cognitive load with an ecosystem letting easily creep technical debt.

Besides, an important part of the JS community, up to now, has let me inconvinced about its ability to do the right thing, not to mention learning from other's past mistakes or even admitting when something is a problem at all.

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> Glad to read that as the top comment, because when they came out, I expressed strong doubts about this new features, and I mostly received mad comments in return. The alienated react fans stated that I didn't understand what modern code was, what a great idea those were and how from now on, everything will be better.

Your post boils down to "Seems like it might be nice, but there might be bad sides, too" which seems fair, but the rest of your post is dressed up in a weird gloating dismissiveness and an exaggerated narrative about you, the epic heroic, fighting back the baying React Fans like in Doom's cover art.

I wouldn't celebrate your skepticism just yet, especially not just because you found someone else on HN to commiserate with.

There have been what I think are some convincing arguments for it in the comments and linked urls like https://overreacted.io/react-as-a-ui-runtime/.

"weird gloating dismissiveness" could summarize most top comments on HN

No my answer boils down to:

- hooks are technically interesting, but make it easy for humans to screw up. It's a precise critic.

- the JS community has bad habits that can catalyse this, and above all, may lead them to avoid seing what's wrong

- they get angry when we say it, and dismiss it as nonsense.

Case in point.

The behavior that you see from a system is the behavior that that system encourages. I guess the proof will be in the pudding as to what hooks actually encourage.

I find a healthy dose of 'gloating dismissive' skepticism is usually a good thing. Because it stands in stark contrast 'gloating dismissive' dismissals of criticisms as 'nonsense' that usually come in the form "nah you just don't get it".

UI paradigms in particular warrant a good deal of skepticism in general. Every time it's "this is way!!!" and there are a whole slew of issues people regret wading into eventually down the line. Then new stuff comes out to fix those issues and "THIS is the way!!!" with the assumption that the new way doesn't have it's own problems (or at least the optimism is just ignoring them as they aren't salient enough yet to impact thinking). This just keeps playing out over and over. No reason its different this time.

So, I think it's absolutely fair to say "I wonder what nastiness come along with hooks that we are accepting as a trade-off for the potential benefits of Hooks?". At the same you can't compute the actual result as an intellectual exercise, so a healthy degree of optimism is warranted too in which we also ought to say "I'm excited to see if this really is the way and maybe we wont arrive at front-end utopia just yet, but hopefully we will get one step closer through the learnings".

That's a fair answer. And for the record, I don't thing we should not give a try to hooks, I just emit doubts.

`hooks are technically interesting, but make it easy for humans to screw up. It's a precise critic.`

You just haven't tried it, right? I love when people talking big but in fact they have 0 exp on some topic.

As one who has adopted hooks in production for 2 projects, one is med-big size.

You CAN NOT screw up. Because if you did, it even won't work or won't build.

And how it helps to decouple logic and code sharing is fantastic.

I don't expect bugs as a screw up, i expect technical debt.

“Commiserate with” is an English expression I’ll enjoy using in the future!

> could add a lot of complexity to a react, a tool that already has a big cognitive load

I don't understand how hooks add complexity or cognitive load. Simple cases stay simple (even more so, and it's harder to mess up with useEffect than with lifecycle methods, for example), and complex cases are less so.

From the point of view of someone with years of experience writing large applications with React, hooks are a very pragmatic move that solves real problems precisely by simplifying what was already possible. The more complex the scenario, the more obvious the gain is. I venture to say the same thing about the upcoming suspense and related features.

I don't think React itself has a big cognitive load anyway. You might be attributing to it the difficulty some aspects of functional programming might present to some, or of some libraries you might have been using with React. I found this to be the case often. Forgive me if I'm guessing incorrectly.

I don't know a big react project that doesn't bring in a massive ecosystem with it. Standard is at least a complex webpack setup with a store and a routing lib.

But more than that, react based code has a lot of indirections, requires a lot of pieces of the puzzle to figure out what's going on, and projects have so many different styles and layout you never feel at home when you switch.

The best exemple is jsx. Not only you need a transpiler, not only do you mix in the same place representation and behavior, but the code looks like either spagetthi inlines, or, if you are lucky, a list of many references you suddenly gotta check up somewhere else.

The thing is, with classes, you have a little guidance on where goes what, and people still manage to screw that up. With hooks it's free for all, with caveats, so reading somebody else's code is going to get extra fun.

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