Comment by azhu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by azhu | Hacker News Reader

All of this reads akin to someone criticizing an apple for not being an orange. Every point is an intentional design decision. Learning new things is necessary, leaving class syntax behind was a choice, and imposing limits on (controlling) application design is the point of libraries.

The team is pushing a functional declarative pipe method of building UI applications where things are built using a straight-line series of composed functional transformations. Personally, I think supporting this method with the hooks model of handling side effects is an improvement over everything else that exists in "roll your own" UI library land. I find these style libraries more enjoyable to build with, more expressive, and better suited to building things where you need finer grain control than template style libraries like Vue, which provide a stronger degree of predictability and ease of immediate use.

That's the thing -- it's a balance. Hooks add a nicely considered and balanced degree of order to the otherwise intentionally uncontrolled-so-you-can-do-the-controlling programming model of React. React identifies as the advanced lego set with the smaller more numerous blocks that you can build the cooler stuff with, and as such will always have a certain threshold of complexity.

You didn’t actually counter any of the authors’ points.

This wonderful functional declarative pipe method of building UI applications where things are built using a straight-line series of composed functional transformations can really suck in real world applications as he tries to demonstrate. Anyone building with hooks now can relate to hooks bringing disorder to the codebase.

Has your experience been different? How did you avoid the pitfalls mentioned?

Well #2 isn't really a pitfall, for starters. I have a new feature that solved a problem I had but I can't use it in the code I wrote before I had it without refactoring? I don't think that critique really has anything to do with Hooks, just software development. It's also basically a rephrasing of #3.

Unless you work on anything beyond a small codebase, and suddenly half of your code cannot be composed with the other.

1. It's not more stuff to learn, it's different stuff to learn, arguably less. Learning Components is not a prerequisite for learning Hooks. Or perhaps I missed the memo, as I've built an app using Hooks, and still haven't need to learn what 'componentWillMount' is supposed to do.

2. Don't mix Components and Hooks.

3. Agreed, change is hard. It's also the only way to avoid stagnation. In the long term, change wins. Or else we'd be programming in JS1995.

4. Insufficient example. What is the business case for a memoized hook returning hooks? Perhaps there is a simpler design, can't comment.

5. There is no global control flow. There is only per function component control flow, which proceeds from top to bottom. Possibly preempted by a hook/hookfn execution, if my early learning curve is to be believed. Which shouldn't matter if one is thinking in terms of 'pure functions returning jsx', as preempted functions do not return, thus have no observable effect.

Tip: Only change hook state from event handlers, never from render function code.

> In the long term, change wins. Or else we'd be programming in JS1995.

Change for the sake of change is not a sound argument.

The thing about hooks is they don't enable a single thing we couldn't already do with HOCs. They are also much harder to read, because stateful logic is now just sprinkled around your render method rather than being isolated to places you know to look for it. I won't be using hooks ever, as far as I'm concerned.

Of course.

* "A Critique of React Hooks"

* "A Critique of the Change Costs Induced by React Hooks".

Objections to React Hooks are stronger if they don't invoke change costs as the primary three concerns.

He/she gave a very valid critique of state being jammed into your render method, vs state being handled in a predictable pattern in Class components.

And lastly, let’s not minimize change-cost. In the real world, it’s a cost. We’re all willing to pay it if it’s necessary, or affordable, but not because someone showed up and said ‘change please’.

Unless you learnt react from non-official sources, you can't avoid learning components because they teach them first.

You'd be surprised. The only deeper dive into Components is https://reactjs.org/docs/state-and-lifecycle.html of the "Main Concepts" section, which I skipped in favor of https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-state.html of the "Hooks" section. Haven't got to "Advanced" yet, hope to stay clear of that.

The React team is working on rewriting the docs to focus on function components and hooks first, as of this quarter:

https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/g2pda4/functional_...

> In the long term, change wins

Yes, but how long is long term?

jQuery hasn't radically changed its methodology in almost 15 years.

> imposing limits on (controlling) application design is the point of libraries

That's the point of _frameworks_. It's very ironic to see this being said in defense of React, given that its original appeal was precisely the opposite stance (i.e. React was "only the v in mvc", in response to the notion that frameworks of the time were imposing).

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