What a great anecdote. It aligns with my big worry here: we are raising a cohort of front-end developers who don't know how to use plain HTML and forms!
"We are raising a cohort of developers who knows nothing about memory management."
Sure, there are things you do not know if all you know is React, but technological changes make it irrelevant in all but the most niche of cases.
That's not a great argument here. Web development is much more of a continuous spectrum. Programming platforms are designed to hide the the layers beneath to a large degree. I'm not saying there aren't leaky abstractions!
We use the term "full stack" for web developers, but people visualize this with layers, but for me it's a really wide list of items and not a very tall stack.
That is fair. You need a bit of many technologies to launch a website. I always interpreted full-stack to mean that you could launch a site on your own, from the database to the buttons and thus do not require a dedicated frontend, backend, or dba.
But yes, that makes developers wide and not deep.
Coming back to C++ after a decade of Python I realised I had largely forgotten about how memory management works and that felt bad. I felt stupid, because not thinking about that wasn't necessarily a good thing.
Although you can use React for mobile (Native) and desktop (Electron)
... but I'd also submitted the JS fragment to Chrome, of course. They ended up flagging it as a high security bug and, not surprisingly, beat me to a fix.
So I never got as far as making a patch, which I guess is why I still don't have a successful compiler career.
I did get a $1k security bounty from Google, though, so that was cool.
Let me see if I can google the bug report. This is it: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=282736
Ah, report reminds me that at that point, the app was all knockout.js. We ported it to a knockout/React hybrid later.
You have to override the submit functionality which is built-in by the browser. You have to maintain state of what the user inputs, which the browser handles for you. You have to reset inputs, which the browser handles for you (button type=reset). And a ton of people forget to actually validate on the server because they validate on the client.
You don't have to maintain the state of what the user inputs if you leave the inputs as uncontrolled (https://reactjs.org/docs/uncontrolled-components.html) and access their value via a ref. You could even give them IDs and access their value directly via that if you wanted to, just like you would pre-React. But there are clearly advantages to making the inputs controlled by React, otherwise there'd be no reason to bother doing so (not saying that there aren't probaly a lot of cases where you could keep it simpler but people have been led to believe they need to put their form data in Redux so use some elaborate solution which doesn't scale, or whatever).
Also if you are doing forms in React, check out formik, it's the nicest library I've found so far. Granted it's not as "easy" as a straight HTML form that POSTs to a new page, of course, but modern web experiences often demand richer functionality than "the old way" allows.
https://redux.js.org/faq/organizing-state#should-i-put-form-...
Also, per the form libraries question: Formik and React Final Form are the two standard packages I suggest folks look at. React Hook Form seems to be gaining some popularity. Also, I recently ran across https://github.com/wsmd/react-use-form-state and tried it in one of my own projects, and was pretty impressed with it as a lightweight option.
Show me the HTML standard that supports SPA submissions that don't reload the page.
It seems that your problem is about SPAs, not React.
Any HTML form that uses a standard button element rather than a submit button. Attach a JS event listener to it, read the form, post by AJAX.
That was a thing long before React came along.
A long time ago, I wrote a single-page chat application that continuously updated through chunked transfers, with submission via a plain old HTML form that received a 204 response.
It's not the recommended way because as soon as you want validation or dynamic fields you need state anyway.
And there're easy libraries like Formik that handle all the annoyances for you (although taking you away from raw HTML at the same time).
Do you miss punch-cards too?
There may be plenty of advantages to using React but it isn't necessary for "SPA submissions that don't reload the page."
At one point or another things don't work and it's because of simple HTML... and not react.
Maybe that's not the right path to learn it but we've reached a point where if you want a job, plain HTML and JavaScript isn't it.... plenty of folks who had the benefit of developing their skills from HTML + JS all the way up will bemoan this situation.... but if they're hiring people they're not hiring anyone who just knows HTML and JavaScript without any exposure to anything else.