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Comment by Kaze404 | Hacker News Reader

What makes you think React/Angular are products to increase user experience? Of course you won't find that, they are tools for developers to streamline development and make maintenance easier. Have you worked on a platform that uses nothing but pure JS and fetch calls? I have, and there's no way to make sense of a project that has to deal with so many things.

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>they are tools for developers to streamline development and make maintenance easier.

I'm not convinced they are successful at that either.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F5hA79vKE_E

why is it downvote ? This link just show you can create a basic twitter like application in 10 minutes with the right tool. Imagine how many hours/days it would take with any JavaScript framework !

Probably because a Twitter close isn't even close to a complex application. You can build one in React/Vue just as fast as you would without them.

Yeah, it's a common trope. Everyone can create a Twitter/Facebook/Instagram clone in a week or so of intense work. But that's not actually the hard part. What's hard is getting millions of users in the first place and scaling to that magnitude. In that order.

Anytime you need to stream data to or from a client, like audio/video or data. Single page apps have a much better experience.

From an architecture standpoint, it does also allow a much simpler separation of concerns.

That said, it does it get used more often that it should and can take more time to build than a multi-page app.

Fucking gmail, for example.

The new SPA version is far, far slower than the old HTML version, and uses a truly insane amount of memory. I have 2 gmail tabs open, and according to Firefox's about:performance page, one is using 140mb of RAM, the other is using 95mb, and both are at the very top of the list in terms of CPU usage. Above even YouTube in both CPU and memory, which is itself fairly bloated.

It is absolutely disgraceful.

Google Cloud Console felt slow to me too. And the user experience could sometimes be better too. For example: I set filters in a table of items, clicked many times to Next to paginate on the 10th page. Then I accidentally clicked on an item on the page, detail page shows. Clicking browser' Back button takes me back but the filter is cleared and I am on the page #1 again. State was not persisted so I could start filtering and paginating again. I am not 100% sure but I think it was the Quota listing. The old, document-style pages used to hold state!

Humans have been using physical and mental systems to manage complexity for eons, I simply can't understand this argument. React doesn't automatically fix spaghetti code if you don't know how to organize a platform-sized code base efficiently in the first place.

This is like saying "cabinets don't help organize a kitchen if you don't put anything in them" -- I mean, duh, you have to use it right. That's not an argument to have no cabinets.

There's a reason nearly ALL major web applications rely on a _framework_....rails, django, laravel, you name it. These exist because it's really hard to organize vanilla code without a framework. React and FE JS are no different.

If you're arguing against using a FE framework to organize FE code, you're basically saying "We don't need frameworks in general! All code should be inherently organized!" That's not realistic. It's just not feasible when you have a large project.

> This is like saying "cabinets don't help organize a kitchen if you don't put anything in them" -- I mean, duh, you have to use it right. That's not an argument to have no cabinets.

Good counterpoint. Parent comment sound too much like the "TRUE programmers don't use data structures" old meme

Yeesh, you've badly misinterpreted my comment. Re-reading it, I'm partly to blame here.

>That's not an argument to have no cabinets.

This isn't the point I was trying to make. I didn't mean to piggy back on this part of the parent comment: "Have you worked on a platform that uses nothing but pure JS and fetch calls?"

I meant to respond to this part of the parent: "they are tools for developers to streamline development and make maintenance easier." I often find that the most ardent React fans will see "not React" and jump immediately to "spaghetti of vanilla js and fetch calls," with no further questions asked.

I'm trying to argue against React dogmatism, I'm not arguing in favor of "no framework" dogmatism.

To be clear I'm not advocating for React on every possible use case. In fact I've grown weary of it over the years, but not for the reasons the comment I was responding to pointed out. My point is that React makes the process of organizing frontend code easier, not that it's the only way to do so.

Well, if we take a step back from React and talk about a sort of data-first approach to UIs, I think they are definitely, much easier than the old jQuery era.

Mutable state, notably knowing all possible variations of said mutable state and how it relates to everything, is very difficult imo.

Is React the best implementation of this? Definitely not. It will evolve as time goes on. But I don't think I could ever manage state in the jQuery mutate-everything model again.

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