Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

His take on React as some kind of marketing-driven conspiracy just seems odd to me.

React became popular because it solved problems that everyone in the frontend was having, did so in a way we could understand, and it did this so well that we were willing to put up with shortcomings like being forced into a SPA, CSS-in-JS, etc. We could jump in with just a little corner of our site or go all-in to a robust ecosystem that was continually evolving to meet the needs of the modern Web, and the resulting code was far more likely to be understood by a new employee than the bespoke jQuery soup that we replaced.

And critically, this was all free and open source. No lifetime hammer subscriptions involved. No lock-in, no monetary sunk costs, so why not try it out?

> I was deeply connected into the valley culture, watching what was happening from the Google side when it all started. It wasn’t money Facebook was looking for, it was talent and mindshare (i.e., power and control).

...Okay? But I'm guessing that most people who adopted and use React on a regular basis have zero interaction with Facebook or Google (the companies that is, not the product).

I dunno. Seems like the critique is a hammer looking for a nail.

I get the concerns about using React in places it doesn't need to be used, and I'm glad that the ecosystem has matured and innovated to allow us to keep what's great about React while also getting back SSR (though there's still work to be done here) and figuring out the best ways to work regular CSS into it.

> His take on React as some kind of marketing-driven conspiracy just seems odd to me.

To me it's so out of reality that it tainted his whole article

Granted I'm not in the US tech scene, but I chose React because AngularJS was horrible (it took one project to never again touch it) and Backbone was arcane and confusing, and I really clicked with JSX

Yeah. Pick your analogy:

- React is the iPhone of the frontend library world. Not the first, some will never say it's the best, but it put things together in a way that resonated with people and organically conquered a ton of mindshare.

- React is the Model T. Before the Model T there was a massively fragmented landscape full of mechanical wizardry and bespoke manufacturing. After the Model T the industry was larger, more consolidated, and standardized.

I don't believe that React will dominate forever. But I do believe that, 50 years from now, people talking about the history of the frontend will view React as the defining thing from the era we're in now.

I think a better analogy would be to compare React frameworks to the iPhone, everything works nicely and a lot of choices have been made for you.

React itself is just a really good JS library, not a full opinionated framework. I made the choice to use React because it was possible to add individual interactive components to an ASP.NET Razor MPA without rewriting the whole thing. Gradually React takes over more and more functionality, necessitating a need for a framework, and then we get the iPhone experience.

I agree. I had to double take on this. I think the difference is that react is really an abstraction, unlike micro services. It would be kind of like accusing Bell Labs of making C or Unix as some sort of conspiracy — if you don’t write your own bootloader you’re someone with a hammer complex?

I was sort of expecting him to go after SSR mania, which would make a lot more sense to me (I am guilty of of this). But railing on an abstraction pattern that literally brought JavaScript out of the dark ages seems way off.

I have noticed in myself and other developers with a decade plus that there is new tech fatigue eventually. With enough cynicism it can look like everyone is trying to use their new hammers on everything (sometimes they are). But I think that’s the flip side to this article and I’m glad he made the React point because it really elucidates the whole thing. Everyone looks like they have a hammer complex when you aren’t interested in learning new things. I think there’s so much value in experience and until he got to React, my internal dialogue was shouting “amen” after every sentence but it’s painfully clear the author did not want to engage or think about the problems React solved.

Yeah, how would Facebook secure talent for itself on the basis of React if everyone else is also using React? Twitter started using React very early on, and Twitter is one of Facebook's biggest social media rivals. Facebook also made no money from React. They developed it because it solved problems for them internally on a complex code base. I've also never seen the original team (Jordan Walke / Pete Hunt) hit the paid course or YouTube influencer circuit. Angular on the other hand, was barely used internally within Google. Most Google products at the time used Closure, their heavy handed JS tooling system (with its custom compiler): https://developers.google.com/closure/library

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