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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

> I don't think many would agree to this but I'd argue the changes are so radical that they almost should've called this new React something entirely different.

Absolutely and I've been saying the same thing for years.

IMO it was an extremely irresponsible thing to do considering React is critical infrastructure at this point. And by completely changing the methodology they made obsolete A LOT of educational content (books, tutorials, videos, etc) in an instant. I'm sure people making money of React education were very happy with this.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against evolution. But if you're going to make such a drastic change just create a new project. Plus I wonder what other improvements/changes they could have made if they had started from scratch.

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Nobody is forcing you to use it.

The react devs made a bunch of code migration tools, used semantic versioning, slowly deprecated old APIs over multiple versions, maintained vids and documentation. Honestly compared with some projects they handled the changes and evolution of the API extremely responsibly.

People are forcing you to use it. It's called employment.

God forbid you're a principal running into some junior engineers and they don't understand that you've forgotten more than they know, and the migration to functional components is just another part of your extended career timeline.

If you’re a principal, just ask your juniors to explain their useEffect()-based mess. When they can’t, mandate class components.

I upvoted because yes.

in practice, pick your battles.

Also then in practice, you'll get people shrugging off their hooks get called 10 times iso 1. then maybe add useMemo everywhere just to be sure. Hmm.. still kind of weird. Maybe sprinkle in some more if-thens, that will fix it! Deep breaths..

This is the true legacy of React, and it's awful. It's not just a case of "you're doing it wrong", because even cutting edge codebases (developed in the last 1 or so) are struggling with this.

"useMemo is the solution" many will tell you. Compared to the way things are handled in Vue, useCallback and useMemo are near enough code smells for something rotting in the center of the React codebase.

Then you get a security audit that you are not using the latest whatever and c-suites panic

If you're a principal, you should be able to keep up with modern tools. Making sure the engineers around you are as productive as possible with their current tools and processes is literally your job!

If as a principal, you are no longer able to keep up with tooling / patterns that everyone else at your company wants to use, its time to take a smaller scope or time to retire.

The job, including mandates (if any are needed) is to empower the people you work with, not to stifle them.

Does anyone seriously expect nothing to change and improve for 30 years, or however long their career is? Not just in software, but any profession. Long gone are the days when the same plow is used for 10 generations.

From my experience its not learning something new thats a problem, but getting the organisational support to push a major change through

> Nobody is forcing you to use it.

Nobody is talking about that. Instead is about how these changes could be done without creating so much confusion in the community. In fact people embrace evolution of these frameworks but with clear changes in methodology, labeled as such and so on.

> Nobody is forcing you to use it.

This argument goes out the door if you need to adopt a library that has already adopting them.

Even reagent, an extremely conservative React wrapper, had to provide support for functional components, hooks and effects eventually.

Yeah maybe, so? That's really not what I'm arguing about.

In the words of succession. This is not a serious product.

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