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Comment by _0w8t | Hacker News Reader

React hooks is another attempt to gain ergonomics. The idea is to try to spread the virtual DOM into native effects. In theory the code specifies or declared the effects once and the framework takes care about subscribing/unsubscribing as necessary. But in practice this became so messy that in any complex cases one better stick to classes and explicit subscribe/unsubscribe.

The right way to do that exists in Elm. But I do not think there is a way to translate that into JS without requiring either a lot of boilerplate or very messy code

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I agree that hooks "can" be messy but in my experience they are quite useful and nice to maintain. That is if the code is written with maintainability in mind - which applies to any code really.

I've been working on a quite complex React codebase for 5 years now - it's not the biggest but still not so small. I was there on day 1. The team that works on it now full time is ~15 devs + 10-15 doing some minor stuff from time to time.

We've started using hooks about 1 year after they introduced them. Before we were very deep into redux and redux-saga. Now most of our codebase uses only hooks for most of the things we did with redux before - there are still some redux but most major parts are migrated to using hooks and contexts. It is probably the best decision we made after switching to TS. Most of our codebase is still very easy to maintain. Last year I went on a paternity leave for 6 months and I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to adapt back.

Edit: forgot to write about Elm. I like elm a lot -even though I don't agree with how it's managed-. I even organized a local elm meetup :) But I think while it is very good in theory, it's not too easy to scale especially if you plan on hiring more devs. Also the way effects and data is completely separated from the view is not very ideal for bigger projects. You either end up having to touch too many files for a single feature or have incredibly big files.

For us the problem with hooks is that we have a lot of complex state that can be shown in different components. So global stores are a must. But then bugs in the hooks can be hard to debug. Also lack of forceUpdate for hooks causes to use artificial state counters complicating the code. Basically with external state class components are more straightforward to write and easier to maintenance .

Oh that's jumping the gun. TEA doesn’t compose and you can pretend you don't need components until you do and then you end up with big mess of hard-to-follow spaghetti code. It's not 'bad', and has good use cases but The Elm Architecture is not without flaws.

Elm composes just fine and you can get close to the semantics of components. I wrote this over 3 years ago, have been using it in many projects with no concerns. https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/z5h/component-result/l...

There are other ways to achieve similar. You don't end up with "big mess of hard-to-follow spaghetti code", you might end up with a "large amount of unfamiliar-looking code". Getting better at reading a larger-than-anticipated amount of unfamiliar code takes a bit of practice, then it isn't a problem. And then you have all the benefits of Elm with zero problems.

The actual hard thing about code is managing complexity, and working with "it just works" magic when it doesn't "just work".

I agree Elm has some flaws, and there is an initial up-front time investment which is unsavoury to many.

Yeah? I wrote something to deal with it too (https://github.com/toastal/return-optics) 5.5 years ago. You arguably chose the wrong data as `(model, Cmd msg, Maybe extMsg)` instead of `(model, Cmd msg, List extMsg)` which would give you more flexibility and still functions as a monoid on [] instead of Nothing, but allows multiple messages shrug. I tried this approach more recently and it involved me having to encode all of actions in a massive tree and then I still had issues with certain messages including now having to UUID all elements that that previously I didn't need to think about. It was a mess, but the best I could do with the tools at hand.

If you compare this to Halogen (https://github.com/purescript-halogen/purescript-halogen/blo...) where you still have purity but can set up subscribers and listeners from any component. It's much easier to use and for some components like dialogs, it's much simpler. And this actually isn't the best example because with the latest Halogen, Portals (https://github.com/purescript-halogen/purescript-halogen/pul...) was introduced so you can launch a dialog on the spot instead of even needing to communicate between them at all.

This is my anecdote though. And I've been away from Elm long enough now (around 1.5 years) that I've forgotten all the specifics.

Thanks for qualifying wrong with "arguably". I did explain in the docs that it was a design choice, but I see your valid point. My motive was to simplify calling code and require dealing with the external message. It's had the intended effect so far. I'll read over the halogen stuff.

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