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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Off topic but the other day I tried again to build a vanilla JS application.

By the end of the day having built quite a lot I then converted the entire thing to react within half an hour stopped wasting my time and got in with the job of building the thing.

I like to try library free JS every now and then and yet again it was not competition for react.

I know react, it makes sense to me, I find it easy and powerful, I know how to fix most issues and probably most importantly Claude is able to write react for me almost without me intervening at all.

I’m not saying react is for everyone but for me it’s a power tool that I know and the AI knows very well and it gets big stuff built quick.

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I did something similar but I took it entirely the other way, I built a full CRUD application with no javascript.

The app is fully SSR and integrates with a fairly complex inline data enrichment and analysis system. I used Tailwind alongside regular CSS for the layouts and some visual enhancements. Eventually, I gave in and added a bit of JavaScript to submit a form when a dropdown is selected—usability is important to me. Other than that, everything works as needed.

You didn't really set the scene. What kind of application was it? If it's a fully interactive rich application with real time multi user handling, then sure. If it was a static page blog, then that's a problem (yet I see people do that anyway). There's a whole spectrum of interactivity and expectations here.

Question is, can you have a super thin layer that gives you the reactivity we all crave and don’t want to reimplement in vanilla ourselves without using legacy tech React.

In a way, it’s depressing that the thing that holds developer minds hostage gets even more hold over devs, because the frickin AI knows it best.

Just a reminder: React was created as a not-a-framework-but-a-view-library but everybody writes React apps, not JS apps.

> React was created as a not-a-framework-but-a-view-library

Honestly, I think this was the biggest mistake the React team made. It was never intended to be this way. It was just marketed this way in order to convince people to try it.

Once you started to use it you could very easily tell how it never fit in the traditional MVC model.

That’s great for you. But every single react project I’ve seen or inherited has been a steaming pile of shit.

All these new front end developers who jumped in on react with no other experience have no idea how web works are struggle to build without react.

Anyone competent in web development prior to react could build with htmx or even vanilla js just as fast without react as they could with react. Won’t stop the brainwashed react devs coming out defending their only source of income tho.

Isn't that like saying that a "competent" woodworker has to know how to use handtools first before trying to build anything with power tools?

What's the problem with starting from an elevated starting point?

That's the fault of bad developers, not React. There are bad developers for each and every language, library, framework, and stack.

There are no good react developers because react encourages you to abstract things into 1000s is tiny files.

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