Comment by EastSmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EastSmith | Hacker News Reader

I feel the pain, seeing non-trivial updates for Ruby, Elasticsearch and Postgres (thanks AWS) this year.

Can not agree with the React part though.

They keep so many things backward compatible. React 16 is 3, 4 years old now? I've updated pretty big code base from early 16 to latest 16 version painlessly - like in a day. Used some of the available code-modes for some really old part of the project. It worked flawlessly. Currently there are console warnings to fix certain things and that is it. No breaking changes, no nothing.

Now, React 17 will be a problem - there are a lots of 3rd party UI libs that will not work with it. But I think we are pretty well set to use react 16 for the next couple of years, making it work for 6, 7 years total. I think that is a century in terms of FE and is great.

Also, "...React pulling a sneaky on everyone and introducing hooks, which was a pretty bad move, especially if you needed to migrate to them" - just don't use hooks then - no problem.

6 years being like "a century in terms of FE" is the core objection being made in both the article and the comments. You're right in every point, but I can't help but feel like you're accepting a state of affairs that should be unacceptable.

Sort of off topic I guess, but: if I wanted to learn react nowadays (coming from extensive backend experience but not much in the front end) where should I start?

From ignorance, it seems like react has changed a fair amount during its lifetime, in terms of good practices, features available, etc. Where can one find resources that are both complete for a begginer and not outdated?

Tbh, I think the tutorial on React’s site itself is pretty good at making an introduction to the framework and the React way of thinking. It’s the one here: https://reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html

As for changes during its lifetime, I would say that it is fairly on par for most web-focused frameworks, both front and backend. You could look at how ASP.NET has changed over the last few versions for example and see it being similar to React’s changes. The largest changes in React recently have been a greater focus on moving from syntactic sugar JS classes to pure functions, and React Hooks that go along with that. There’s definitely a shiny things syndrome you get if you just google for React tutorials, which is a bit annoying, but the official docs are pretty solid, and a few of the core devs are great to follow from a philosophical standpoint (like @dan_abramov).

Hope that helps!

create-react—app is a good way to create the necessary scaffolding.

There’s an O’Reilly book called Learning React (2nd Edition) which is great. It brings you up to speed on the history of the framework as well.

I can second that book, speaking as someone who also hasn't really programmed in JS in a while.

The new React documentation page[0] is still in beta but worth checking out, since the current documentation's code examples still use class/component-based code, which is not so common since React Hooks were introduced.

[0]https://beta.reactjs.org/learn

What are the benefits to updating frontend packages. Are there security vulnerabilities that I should be worrying about if most of my npm dependecies dont get updated.

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