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Comment by 8note | Hacker News Reader

I think the innovation comes from making it easy to do. Its been transformative for how people write UI code as a result

Its innovative in the same way as the iPhone was. All of the concepts existed before, but nobody made them practical and cheap

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On that point, I think the next innovation to come to front end development is to declaratively think about states using finite state machines & statecharts.

A concept that also has existed before, but with XState, I think a lot of developers will latch onto this paradigm.

The ability to think or plan a feature/apps states in the beginning rather than imperitavely or as an afterthought during development is really valuable. And perhaps if we're dealing with something more visual at the beginning, its easier to demonstrate what will happen if I click "X". and then it becomes easier to spec out & to involve PMs/designers and QA.

I suppose. It just feels weird that the post was highlighting hooks and context, while VDOM was omitted. VDOM was easily the biggest thing in my opinion. I had never seen anything like it and it worked wonderfully. It's not to say that everything else in React is bad, it's more like everything else pales in comparison to how huge VDOM was when it was introduced.

Kinda like hyping iPhones innovation without ever mentioning touch screens.

I read it more as talking about a revolution within React. Hooks and context are (relatively) new features that do "revolutionize" how you write components. That's not to say VDOM isn't important, it just isn't anything new, it's been a part of React since the beginning.

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