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Comment by 7777fps | Hacker News Reader

I liked that model because as an ASP webforms developer the class lifecycle is easy to reason about, like a page lifecycle.

In ASP you wouldn't put initialisation code in the page constructor either, it would go in Page_Init, Page_Load, etc.

Of course the tooling there made it both easier to put in the right place and harder to edit the page constructor to stick it in the wrong place.

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I remember ASP.NET Webforms, and the reason most of the community moved towards MVC-ish frameworks is exactly that most of the time, you ended up shoehorning functionality into different lifecycle methods, which made them much harder to reason about. Most of the time, for anything more complex than just performing the initial databinding, you'd just be looking at the lifecycle chart and trying to figure out which place would be best to put which part of your code. Page_Init? Page_Load? Page_PreRender? I remember the pain of trying to add dynamic controls to a site right in time before ViewState was hydrated but AFTER something else had happened.

I agree that for the easiest of use cases, lifecycle methods make sense. But you very quickly leave that comfortable zone and then it just becomes painful and confusing.

Don't worry, I'm not espousing lifecycles as a panacea or solution for the modern programmer, I just wanted to share that experience with lifecycle methods meant that I was less tripped up by the pitfalls of react lifecycles.

Less so than I've been tripped up by react hooks certainly so it's been a surprise that many here are describing them as being much easier and simpler than classes.

Classes had limits and some pitfalls but it's been frustrating that lifecycle methods have been retired and deprecated because sometimes they felt like the natural place to do something.

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