React.js koans | Hacker News Reader

React.js koans

github.com

160 pointsandrzejkrzywda30 comments

I was expecting something about a monk who had to report to two masters at the same time; but as he reported, the state changed, so they were never synced.

These are not the koans I was looking for.

I think you have this mixed-up with the story where a react developer updates 1 component on the first render, 2 components on the second, 4 components on the third, 8 on the fourth, and so on, until he's rendered a whole chess board.

I was expecting something very different from the word "koans". IMO, "React.js exercises" would be a better title for the project.

"exercises" is not hip enough.

A nod to ruby koans (which was probably a nod to another language): https://github.com/neo/ruby_koans

I believe the word they were looking for is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata

Hmmm.... googling around, there seems to be a lot of recent "programming koans" that are actually collections of rote exercises rather than lessons in zen enlightenment. Frustrating...

It looks like what happened was that a while back, someone made a very nice set of exercises each presented as a koan and a failing unit test to "meditate upon". Imitators then watered that down to exercises presented as failing unit tests to "meditate upon". Which was later watered down to just exercises...

For a classic example of an actual programming koan, I can only refer to the archive of Doug Bagely's "Functional Programming Koans, in OCaml" http://web.archive.org/web/20041012103936/http://www.bagley.... and, the old favorite teaching the relationship between objects and closures http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...

If this is the case, we should appeal to the author's sense of decency.

The concept of 'koan' is far too unique and beautiful to be watered down.

I think you're right in the confusion of koan and kata, but unfortunately yes, I have seen a lot of that happening lately (perhaps due to greater awareness of the word from recent popularity of CodeWars[0]?). Interestingly I've only seen this mistake in this direction, I have not seen any koans mislabeled as kata.

[0] http://www.codewars.com/about

  > Which was later watered down to just exercises...

What if the word "koan" were understood to mean "excercise"?

That's the problem. Someone made a nice set of "programming koans" that were (koans + exercises). But, that has spawned new "programming koans" that are just a set of (exercises) with no koans. Koans are supposed to involve practice [0]. But, does practicing a set of (koans + exercises - koans) have koan-nature? ;)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dan

Same.

Although apparently the word is misused a lot: http://www.lauradhamilton.com/learn-a-new-programming-langua...

Not sure if this is a fight we can still win.

Outsider's perspective looking in: This is hacker versus cracker all over again.

People are probably awful... They hear a new word, don't know what it means, and then copy it all over the place until it doesn't mean anything anymore.

I haven't had a chance to try React.js koans yet, but recently completed a tutorial in the same vein, a "workershopper", from nodeschool.io: https://github.com/tako-black/learnyoureact. As a React.js noob, I found it to be a helpful introduction.

Yeah this nodeschool lesson on react is pretty good if you are just getting your feet wet.

I've been itching to learn about React but it's difficult to get into. Thanks for making this, it's very useful to me!

I decided to move from learning Angular+Ionic last night to going with React.js+React Native and found this good dump of information from Github https://github.com/enaqx/awesome-react

Looking forward to trying this tutorial right now.

Just curious, why did you make the change? I've been building apps in Angular and Ionic for a bit now and haven't played with React yet.

Not the OP but after trying out React, it feels like the way I've always wanted to structure components in JavaScript. I did a once-over of the Angular tutorials and the kitchen-sink approach doesn't really do it for me. React is about your Views, and the logic contained therein, and that's it.

Without virtual DOM considerations on the line, after about a week of it it's very intuitive. The whole component lifecycle thing seems overkill until you realize you have full control over the components. Things are a little trickier if you have to use it as I do (with jQuery), but even then, your biggest hurdle is understanding props vs state -- once that's cleared up, the sky's the limit.

Im Bootstrapping a start up this summer and it seems like in the long term it will be better to stay with just a JS code base and not having to worry about the Typescript Angular 2 transition.

This is my first serious app so I'm new to a lot of the backend architecture options. I have no experience with Devops so I was thinking about creating the first version with a parse backend then moving to a docker container on AWS when it would start saving me some money.

I guess the question I would put out to Hacker News is how would you suggest I estimate the technical debt this would shoulder me with later on and would it be better to integrate with AWS now? I have a small amount of funding, about 2500$ and 100% free time before I go back to college this September.

It's not technical debt that will kill your nascent startup, but failing to achieve product-market fit. Don't worry about the technology choices. Get something done that you can put in front of potential customers.

Personally, I just feel stupid every time I try to do anything in Angular... None of it works the way I expect it to, and I can't get the point where I feel like I actually understand what's going on.

React's "rerender the world" approach is _much_ easier to reason about.

I just took a ReactJs workshop last week and was really impressed with how easy it was to use. The guy that was giving the workshop (Henrik Joretag) used it with AmersandJS and Webpack. He was also using a lot of the new ES6 syntax which was really cool.

The reason he was really into React was how it just deals with the views so you have the flexibility to combine it with other libraries to get what you need and you're not locked into a full framework like AngularJS.

I've been getting into Angular recently, but this really opened my eyes to how powerful React is.

Nice way to learn React! For me the tasks could be a bit more clear, especially the first time when I was looking for what I had to do. But I'll definitely try to learn some React this way!

I think that's why it's called react-koan

The setup doesn't appear to be working from a windows/mingw32 environment. (Most npm installers do work in this environment.)

Did you try submitting an issue on GitHub? https://github.com/arkency/reactjs_koans/issues

I just did submit it by my own. Sorry for that hassle.

If you have more detailed error information, I would be glad if you put them into the comments.

https://github.com/arkency/reactjs_koans/issues/9

I've tried the instructions (npm run setup) on both a Mac and Ubuntu and resulted on several screen-fulls of npm ERR! messages. Again killed my mild curiosity for React.

Yeah, I would argue that these are kata rather than koan.

edit: changed to plural.

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