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Comment by blueprint | Hacker News Reader

your only problem with events is you dont know how to write code that remains simple

react and view frameworks arent the solution to that problem. react isnt even reactive - you still have to deal with event -> repaint.

react only tried to obscure that into a constraint language instead while actually hamstringing you and pushing the complexity elsewhere

events are here to stay and that's a good thing. these reactive frameworks borne out of an attempt to avoid events or complexity don't eliminate events or complexity - they make everything into an event or a necessarily complex structure in their attempt at pathological avoidance. the solution is factoring and proper honesty in your semantic names. but most people would rather blame their (very ample) tools than their skill or laziness or apathy.

i will say async/await is a big help for humans but synchronous code vs asynch as you may know is not the problem at hand here.

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> your only problem with events is you dont know how to write code that remains simple

Yes, it's the "only" problem. All the higher level languages, frameworks, programming paradigms are trying to tackle this problem.

that's not even true, but I hate to break it to you, but literally every generation of language involves handling events unless you get into constraint systems which, as I mention, are for people who dont want to use the greater capability of the underlying generation.

wish people would be honest. it's obviously true that not every framework is trying to be avoidant about their lack of program skills. Some of them are actually useful. where I draw the line is forcing all of your application code to conform to a poorly thought out, half baked solution to reactive data flow, which doesn't even solve that particular problem and leaves you having to handle events anyway.

Thanks for the downvoted tho.

Are people using frameworks to avoid writing event handlers?? I use them to avoid having to manually sync UI state with data structures.

it's the same thing. and you still have to manually sync to the exact same degree using these frameworks or not. state setting is part of the von neumann architecture itself so it appears directly in all programming languages you use. so the problem you say you're using them to solve isn't the problem.

With Vue, I add an element to a list.

With vanilla JS, I would have to add the item to the list, then get the parent element, then create a div containing a bunch of hardcoded stuff, give it an id, keep track of that id, insert the item, then when I remove the item I would have to remove the item from the list.

That could double the amount of cod e needed in most stuff I do.

Vue is vanilla JS - it is a construct of vanilla JS - so it is not what I'm talking about when we talk about generations of languages etc. You still interact with it procedurally or imperatively.

Overall, Vue is honest. React is decidedly not.

I don't have any direct experience with React, but it does seem to be overwhelmingly popular. I assume the devs making insanely complicated stuff at fortune 500

that has nothing to do with it. There are a ton of React implementations, some by third parties, that are not complex. React has also changed majorly multiple times. I don't know how experienced you are, but that should tell you something (bad). It means they don't know what it really is and what they're building. That's another way of saying they don't know what they're doing. unless by complex, you mean that they're good at scamming people. Because that's pretty much what the company that made it is all about, in case you didn't notice.

Excessive breaking changes on a short time do seem like a pretty bad indicator of quality.

It's not a framework I would use by choice, I've been working with Vue for many years, and I've also done some minor Lit and Svelte work.

But it does seem like it's still very widely used, so I assume there must be something about it people really like.

At the very least, the ecosystem and legacy stuff seems like enough to justify using it on some projects, although Vue seems to have caught up.

> But it does seem like it's still very widely used, so I assume there must be something about it people really like.

this is very dangerous and flawed reasoning. There are many examples of where this goes horribly wrong. One of the nice ones is something called normalcy bias. but hey, let's just vote to murder Socrates again because he acknowledged that he was intentionally triggering us as an act of love.

Oops... this comment got cut off somehow.

I assume all the devs at the large companies know what they're doing with react, since I rarely hear that much complaining, so I suppose it's well suited for very large projects.

naive or crazy- I'll let you choose :p

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