Background on React's __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED

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26 points·pcr910303··5 comments

I don't know about anyone else, but I feel that I've learned a lot about Meta from this variable's existence, and the backstory to it. Imagine the power internal teams have where they can simply make life difficult for another team just because it's convenient, and the only way to stop it is to SHOUT_A_LIE_IN_ALL_CAPS. Pretty wild.

I dont know anything about Javascript or Facebook(yes Im calling them that) culture, but yes, it does seem like an extreme way to work around cultural issues, plus issues in the underlying language.

You have to read a lot of code to know how to integrate with systems there. This strongly signals what you should avoid doing, and I don’t know anyone who actually thinks you’d be fired using it. Meeting rooms are jokingly named after these. It sounds worse out-of-context then it is in practice.

What's the difference between that, and just using a private variable?

Languages may not be able to restrict the operations you make on certain variables even if they are private, and even if you should use only public interface, it always happens that you try to tinker with libraries internals to get your hack working... Having this explicit in the name to me is just a stronger repetition of this concept!

https://nitter.net/dan_abramov/status/1489278948517289991 - for those who can't read without seeing a login screen

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