Hacker News Reader

Comment by weatherlite | Hacker News Reader

Layoffs or no layoffs it is extremely unlikely React will be used as much as it is now 5-10 years from now. It will probably be legacy no one wants to touch anymore. That's the nature of front end development unfortunately.

I hope to be proven wrong btw ...its about time we have a FE framework surviving more than 10 years.

View on HN

React is already almost 10y old. Just check framework usage and downloads, stackoverflow survey etc. React just keep rising, exponentially. Vue had major growth couple of years ago, but it flatlined since then. TBH I don't see React going anywhere in the next 10y. It's like Java of frontened world. You think it's not there, but it's everywhere.

Replace React with jQuery in your post, see what happens.

jQuery (2006) was unseated by specific things like Angular (2010), Ember (2011) and then React (2013). What is taking over React currently? Vue?

And Backbone.js (2010).

And certainly in 2012, both Angular.js and Ember used jQuery as an integral part of their implementation and even exposed it directly to users in their directive/Ember.$ APIs, so the actual end of widespread jQuery in new projects was later than that.

I'll say the death of JQuery rather than being replaced by React or Angular, was more a result of standardization of ECMAScript and the progress of native APIs in browsers.

Before JQuery creating your own JS for a weird IE6 bug was a nightmare; but with that problem solved in the modern web development, JQuery killer feature became a little redundant.

I seriously doubt "native web components" or something similar will catch in the same momentum to kill React.

The number of people who went from jQuery to native is much much lower than you mention. Most moved to angular/react/vue/some framework. People replaced jQuery to handle state easier not because of standardization..

Idk I’m not a front end guy but I mostly stopped to reach for jquery as much. Standard stuff are sufficient ( for simple site and POC )

React keeps evolving, following technological progress, inventing new approaches to make frontend development easier. As other comment pointed out, React today is not the same as React 5y ago and it will not be the same 5y from now. jQuery is the same as jQuery 5y ago. Java is not the same as Java 10y ago, it kept evolving. That's why is still strong and alive. That's why React is here. That's why jQuery is not.

It might be still called React but will be completely different. How similar are React + hooks + redux to React of 4 years ago? We call both React but it's hardly similar. Fast forward 10 years from now...

True, however even redux is on its way out. Dan Abramov, the creator, doesn't particularly recommend it anymore. Now, you'll see more React-Query and into the future: use() hook and SSC (Server Side Components)

FWIW, my estimates show that Redux is still used by 35-40% of React apps [0]. That's definitely less than it was a couple years ago, but still the largest usage of any React-related state lib by far. (It's also worth noting that Dan stopped working on Redux in 2016 after one year and handed it over to Tim Dorr, myself, and now Lenz Weber, and has not been involved with Redux since then.)

On the flip side, usage of our modern Redux Toolkit package continues to go up fairly rapidly (to the point that RTK by itself is more widely used than other libs like Mobx or Zustand), and we get tons of positive feedback daily from folks who enjoy using it.

Also, Redux Toolkit's "RTK Query" data fetching and caching API also addresses the same use case as React Query, with some unique features and capabilities (OpenAPI/GraphQL codegen, streaming updates, cache lifecycles) [1].

So, while Redux will never be the "must-have" it was in 2016-17, it's still an excellent choice in many cases, and still very widely used.

[0] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2022/07/npm-package-market...

[1] https://redux-toolkit.js.org/rtk-query/comparison

It's a pity Vue is not getting more love and attention. I enjoyed working with it and seemed very promising.

Then they copied React and went with hooks and use this and use that and all that nonsense. One might argue they also copied angular 1 initially so they have no original ideas.

JSX style templates and components aren't going anywhere. A new framework that handles context and events better than React by default might ascend, but a good portion of FE dev work will look the same.

yeah, tried angular again recently.. absolutely terrible dx

react came out in 2013

so if it survives another year it'll be 10 years already; it's not going to disappear in the next year.

Point taken you are right. So I wanna see a mainstream FE framework make it to 10 without completely changing its API (Angular, React hooks) or its state management (Redux, Mobix..what is next?)

If you know Rails or Django fast forward 9 years.. you still know them. Can you say the same about React?

For the record: I maintain Redux, and it's never been an actual recommendation from the React team. In fact, Dan has publicly stated that "the only state management tool we recommend is React itself".

Redux is certainly the most widely _used_ state management lib in React apps, but that's a community-driven thing, not anything the React team has specifically suggested (in the same way that React Router is the most commonly used routing lib).

Oh no doubt. I am not blaming anyone specific here. I'm just calling it as it is - the way you write React apps now will be completely different 10 years from now.

I think just frontend is a more apples to apples comparison. In that scope, what >10 teams >1m ARR are using plain Rails/Django html templates with html button actions and such? If you shop around at Rails/Django jobs, they're almost all going to be using different frontends that you'd need to ramp up on: React, Vue, jQuery, Hotwire, Turbo, Stimulus, HTMX, Alpine.js, etc. You could also say "If you know jQuery fast forward 9 years ago... you still know it" and be right about keeping yourself to the limited opportunities to do it the old-fashioned way.

I think React has made a deep impression in the industry and wont disappear overnight. There is less of a 'brainer' these days if you want to choose the boring tech for SPA (or similar) apps, and that is React.

Which framework do you think is the next big thing in the Frontend world?

I am hoping vanilla JS will some day replace all the frameworks as the core features the frameworks have get absorbed into web standards natively, like what happened to jQuery. It's already perfectly possible to build a modern SPA UX without frameworks but a lot of devs don't generally prefer it. Yet?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com