> Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years.
I've been writing React professionally for over a decade at this point. I don't know what this guy's on about.
I've been writing React professionally for over a decade at this point. I don't know what this guy's on about.
If you're on recent-enough versions and are using any popular libraries, you will have seen the deprecation notices pile up during npm install for downstream dependencies.
Thing is, we are the reason for the treadmill being there: we love the new shiny, we call software that is stable "dead", we actively mock software that doesn't have a lot of churn as "not being developed". So I guess we deserve what we get.
Even a well-maintained project like React can't escape the squalor of its ecosystem.
I don't always have this option, but usually these days I choose vanilla JS, imported with no build system, do as much as I can with Python/Django on the backend, and opt out of the JavaScript ecosystem entirely. I haven't regretted it.
That's a problem with your build system then, not React. There is (or was) indeed a lot of churn in build systems, but you wouldn't have been spared unless you had chosen to not use a build system - which is still possible with React, but not with Svelte, Vue or Angular.
My current position on build systems is that if it doesn't work out of the box with esbuild, I'm not using it. If it does work out of the box with esbuild, then it's likely also going to work with whatever comes after.
Did you read the sentence that you're "correcting"?
> My current position on build systems is that if it doesn't work out of the box with esbuild, I'm not using it. If it does work out of the box with esbuild, then it's likely also going to work with whatever comes after.
Your optimism is admirable.
This side conversation started as an objection to the comment, "Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years."
The first release of esbuild was November 2020, i.e. it didn't exist 5 years ago. And that release fixed... conditional statements in TypeScript--a pretty basic feature to be broken. Does that sound like something you want to use in production?
So maybe your strategy of only using things that work with esbuild doesn't address the problem as much as you think it does.
Conditional types (not statements) are not a basic feature.
I've been writing JavaScript that entire time, and the complete disregard for maintenance has gotten worse, not better.
You seem to be under the impression that because I also write other languages, I haven't been keeping track of what's happening in the JS ecosystem, but you're wrong--I still write JS, because I often don't have any other option.
The fact that I work in other languages means I get to see what I like about better-managed ecosystems. If you're writing JS on both frontend and backend and not using anything else, it's likely that you don't know how bad things are for you because the JS churn has been normalized for you.
React lets you suck in 80 components from 15 different vendors and it works. NPM lets you suck in more dependencies than many other systems because it deals with diamond dependencies better than other systems [1]
Because you can mix and match so many widget sets no wonder you will have trouble when those widget sets change.
[1] package A can import version B of package C, package D can import version E of package C -- so long as A and D don't exchange objects from package C there is never a problem, even if they do it might work.
React itself is an exception which is well-developed because a competent developer team (Facebook's) depends on it. The vast majority of JS libraries are absolute garbage from idea to implementation to maintenance. Nobody should be depending on these libraries, and yet the vast majority of JS projects do depend on these libraries.
You can certainly run into similar problems in, for example, Python, if you decide to import all of pip with impunity, and there are certainly Python projects with this problem that I've worked on. But Python at least has a core group of commonly used libraries that keep sane dependency trees. You literally can't build modern JavaScript without using some bleeding edge nonsense that won't work in a few years.
Thankfully, as I've said before, you don't have to use the mainstream toolchains. Browsers and standards organizations have been much better about at least not breaking reverse compatibility.
Bold of you to assume I have worked in React for this long and somehow didn't know about this brittle solution to a problem which shouldn't have existed in the first place.
How does your solution handle packages that no longer exist? Let me guess, we back up the packages? Okay, so these packages don't run on new versions of relevant binaries--do we back up the binaries as well? How bad does it have to get before you admit it's a tire fire?
People arguing with me here don't seem to remember this breaking like 1/2 the JS builds in existence for a few days.
I hear from the b/e people about containers, serverless, lambdas, ORMs, queues, schedulers, caches, pipelines (ok, I use these too), databases, API gateways. Oh, but it's podman now, not Docker. And they're moving everything off AWS to Azure. And there's three versions of the API my f/e needs to talk to still in production. And every micro-service depends on a different version of Node. Apart from the one that's in Ruby and the stuff from that department who only use .NET.
I don't believe this promised land of clarity, comfort and purity exists. It's just mess on both sides of the internet connection trying to solve different parts of the problem of turning user needs into money.
Maybe fixing security issues by updating the dependencies? How likely will that happen without you having to rewrite the code of the app?
HOC still exist and builtin features like `React.memo(MyComponent)` along with the like of more functional styles means they aren't ever going away.
Every place that I've been at has made the gradual shift to migrate stuff away from class components as new stuff gets built or refactored. Seems like a pretty common development habit.
- they're much harder to learn and understand than the callback hooks from class components
- The built in ones hide all the ways React is managing state for you behind obscure names that don't reflect how or when to use any of them
- The new-ish `use` built-in doesn't follow the same usage rules as the rest of them (you can use it in places you can't use the others)
- the stateful ones create side effects (unless you pretend that state is an argument), so they don't even follow an easy-to-grasp version of the functional paradigm
- they have strange quirks (like you basically have to write your component function to use its hooks before you render anything... so you can't early return)
- the mental model for how to put them together when you're writing custom ones is a little bit funky too.
- the early "advert" for them was that we could put all our domain knowledge together in one place, rather than spread about over multiple callbacks. Given that we usually need to interact with a couple of domains at a time, in time with component lifecycles, I think this makes the code harder to work with rather than easier
All of the WYSIWYG editors that work on 16 are no longer supported. it's a "cross your fingers" in case someone found a security issue (or don't use them)
React 16 is still supported, but it's definitely obsolete.
Before that I used Backbone on top of jQuery.
Before that I used jQuery.
Before that I used the document, but I still use the document.
I have barely had to learn anything each decade.
It’s different paradigm, best practice, file organization, etc.
So it’s close to learning a new language.
And I won’t even go into the fact that Next is replacing React as the standard.
Hilarious, and accurate.