> Then I don't understand why you're writing an article about it? Just to rant about the React hype? That seems a bit pointless.
I mean, the thesis is "If you are building websites, you don’t need React (in most cases)." And it ends with "Knowing React could only make you a better developer, and I am not saying you shouldn’t learn it. However, I am saying that it is not needed in most cases if your goal is to build websites."
Whether you "need" something seems like a rather vapid bar to quibble over. You don't really "need" anything, but evaluating the trade-offs of using something is one of the primary roles of an engineer.
On HN, we too quickly circlejerk over whether a given project really "needed" some bit of tech and brag about how we could build it without, as if that's the metric that matters.
If you used React unnecessarily and the project is worse off for it, fine, you're still learning. But it all too often becomes one of these blog post rants with the extra whammy of people coming into the comments to brag about how they've been hand-coding HTML since 1999 and don't see the point of a tool like React or Javascript.
“You don’t need react for websites” would be the better headline. Even then you’d expect the author to have at least some experience using the tools in order to make a good critique or informative article.
Even a small preface that this doesn’t apply to web apps or business software etc.
This puts a lot of weight on the reader when it’s the authors job to communicate effectively when asking for people’s time investment.
The author might not realize it but he actually confirmed a point. React just doesn’t click for some people. I’m one of them. I have fairly extensive coding experience though only a few years professionally. I’m not a front end engineer but have created and maintained websites that were in production. I’d not consider my code scalable though. I have used jquery and now I use vue. I have tried again and again and react (and let’s not start with redux) just doesn’t click. It seems too cumbersome, at the least for anything less than a massive massive application. I also abhor SPAs. I am genuinely curious why I and apparently some others as well have so much trouble clicking with react.
I'm curious how well you would describe your understanding of Vue?
Because to me React and Vue are basically the same concept under the hood but presented differently (single file components vs functions that render html).
Yeah - I agree with the article's premise, but it's a pretty weak effort given that the author hasn't really delved into React.
Having done a fair number of side by side implementations of things with React and vanilla JS / jQuery, React has always ended up more code and complexity (and an inconvenient extra build step). More shunting state up and down the call stack to conform to the functional architectural ideals, etc.
It shines on certain types of problems, but seems to get shoehorned into a lot of others due to hype and groupthink.
Looking at more of the authors site, it seems they're primarily a wordpress developer.
If they had focused down on "you don't need react for static sites", it would have been a more valid complaint. But as written, it seems that the author just doesn't have experience with larger web apps.
Then I don't understand why you're writing an article about it? Just to rant about the React hype? That seems a bit pointless.