Many folks were criticizing hooks when they were introduced.
Of course React devs will "prefer" it; they are the idiomatic way to adding state/triggering effects in React.
Of course React devs will "prefer" it; they are the idiomatic way to adding state/triggering effects in React.
Hooks were nice when they came out, but woefully under-documented. The fact that decent docs for hooks first development came out literally just this year when hooks have been out for years is kind of a shame.
As opposed to useEffect, most other hooks are fairly straightforward, but the fact it years of articles upon articles of mistakes and documentation to explain useEffect to both experienced and non-experienced devs alike shows that it really wasn't that great of an API for end users.
In fact the most common topic nowadays is how much you need to avoid useEffect, especially if you're not a library developer. None of this was documented/mentioned when it first came out.
Yes it does enable powerful workflows, but plenty of other frameworks/libraries handle the same thing in a nice way with much less drawbacks than react. (ex: automatic dependency tracking, etc)
The number of times I have to tell people to stop putting things in effects at all, or that the reason something isn't working is a stale callback due to missing dependencies in my opinion shows that its not really a good API for the average dev to be using.
Devs use hooks primarily because hooks are better.
No, but the React ecosystem has almost collectively migrated away from class-based components or deprecated support for them.
> Devs use hooks primarily because hooks are better.
You avoid much of the dependency array issues by using class components. But you have to deal with `this` and it's significantly more keystrokes. It's more of a tradeoff in my opinion.
Also, devs don't use hooks primarily because they are better. They use them because they are idiomatic React in 2023.
:hmm:
yes, exactly!
> They use them because they are idiomatic React
right, and do you think it'd be easy for a feature to become idiomatic if it wasn't an improvement over the previous patterns?