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Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to that page letting me see how many dozens of lines of code React needs to do the equivalent of

    const element = document.createElement("h1");
    element.innerHTML = "Hello";
    element.setAttribute("title", "foo");
    const container = document.getElementById("root");
    container.appendChild(element);

I now have even less interest in ever touching a React codebase, and will henceforth consider the usage of React a code smell at best.

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To be fair, if all you need is to add elements to a child you don’t need React.

Maybe nobody needs React, I’m not a fan. But a trivial stateless injection of DOM content is no argument at all.

The "magic" of React though is in its name, it's reactive. If all you're doing is creating static elements that don't need to react to changes in state then yeah, React is overkill. But when you have complex state and need all your elements to update as that state changes, then the benefits of React (or similar frameworks) become more apparent. Of course it's all still possible in vanilla JS, but it starts to become a mess of event handlers and DOM updates and the React equivalent starts to look a lot more appealing.

All of that is the JavaScript equivalent of

    <h1 title=foo>Hello</h1>

I have even less interest in touching any of your codebases!

Well I'd hesitate to touch any of my codebases, too, so that's fair :)

Stop touching my vanilla.js codebase, you naughty!

Given the verbosity of Java's hello world vs Python's, you'd walk away with the conclusion that Java should never be used for anything, but that would be a mistake.

    #!/usr/bin/env java --source 25
    void main() {
        IO.println("Hello, World!");
    }

Many of Java’s hatred comes from old Java. The rest comes from Spring.

Clearly Java only belongs on things like credit cards and Minecraft /s

Why do you have to remind us that Java Card exists?

This code only works if run in a browser composed of millions of lines of C++.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of React devs cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

I love the term "React devs", it comes up on here a lot, and imagines a straw man group who really don't know how to build apps for the browser without React. It exists in tandem with the "frameworks for the web change every week" crowd, creating a vicious farcical enemy simultaneously confronted with a constant cycle of relearning while never being capable of learning at all.

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