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Comment by seangrogg | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the best things I've done to date is actually distance myself from the React community. While I love some of the tooling that has come out of it (Redux, React-Router) I think the community (as an amorphous entity) over-emphasizes the need/desire for transpiling, linting, testing, etc.

Since then, I've "reverted" to building things in ES5, working in multiple files without bundling, etc. and I have to say the enjoyment I get out of using React has cranked up considerably.

I am happy to see they are converging on some standards - that will definitely make building new apps much easier from a common starting point. I just hope they can walk the fine line between "opinionated" and "bloated".

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I was just talking about this with coworkers... I love React but the community (aside from the actual creators and leaders like Dan) is too much for me and seem to love bloat and unnecessary features. The cynical side of me thinks a lot just do it for GitHub stars and blog views, but maybe not.

Of course, we just spent two days trying to decipher a React/Redux project whose lead dev decided to use every "latest" feature even though it's a good ol' CRUD app.

We think ES6 is not the problem here. It’s just a language, and arguably a better one than ES5.

The problem is the low level tooling around it. This is what we’re trying to fix with this project. Hopefully you’ll give it a go, and maybe it will give you just as much enjoyment as using <script> tags. If not, please let us know how we can improve.

It’s not linting/transpilation/bundling that’s bad, it’s that it’s hard to do them without shooting yourself in the foot.

I definitely use ES6 for sure, though nothing too crazy (no decorators, bind :: thingy, etc).

Do you remember how you were telling people on Twitter that they don't need every single crazy feature and every single thing in the Redux store (or even Redux at all) to do React? The kind of people I am complaining about are the ones that say the opposite.

I think the problem is that React is developed as more of a Node/JavaScript project than as a web project. You see this in stuff like depending on `process`, a thing that exists in Node but not on the Web. So the Web is a compilation target; not the platform that React is developed for.

From there it's easy to think about everything in terms of JavaScript, and not making the Web the intended target for usage.

Yeah, along these lines, I also hate how most of the examples/tutorials online assume your server is Node.js. I'd love to find some official documentation on the best ways to use it with Asp.net and Rails, for example.

That's usually because those tutorials are also setting up sever side rendering. Node.js is only needed for that and for running the various (optional) build tools.

When doing a SPA I often set up Node.js to serve the index and provide server-side rendering and then never touch it again. Any actual API/WebSockets/RPC interfaces the app needs can be serviced by any plain old Ruby, Python, PHP, etc app backend. Since I usually use PHP from old habits, I use a Symfony API-only application.

I posted about this in a top level comment, but don't forget React can control any element in your DOM and not just the entire body like most SPA's are setup. You can continue using whatever languages/frameworks templating and view systems and augment views as needed that would be better handled by React.

Oh no, I love (most of) ES6 and enjoy it when something shows green on caniuse. But I dropped Babel/Webpack from my build and (personally) determined that not needing to deal with configuration, deprecation, etc. messages in my terminal was worth the +0.005s to initial render and using <script> tags in my index.html file.

That being said, I'll likely give this a spin tonight for somerandomcrappyidea.js and provide you guys some feedback. Unfortunately, my work at Google has me more focused on Angular so I don't have as much time as I'd like to work on React applications. =<

As an aside, thanks for the work you've done on Redux and the talk that you gave at Hack Reactor!

Are you still using JSX? Even a very minimal babel/webpack setup like this one has really sped up my productivity, but I'm interested in the alternatives...

Yeah, this is basically what kills it for me. When I was unemployed and just building random apps for fun it was great that there was a lot of ongoing progress and evolution in the React community. But when I came back a few months later to show off an app the npm install process let me know everything was deprecated - a bit vexing to consider how much work would be required to keep my shitty side projects up-to-date - not even considering actually building new features into them.

I did the same thing and found it quite nice too. I tinkered a lot with React and while the reactive features are nice, its such a pain to do anything in React because of the millions of steps you have to go through just to do something basic. I've tried it, tried Redux, done server side rendering, etc. For now I'm just gonna use Django and the built in Django template system while waiting for the React community to mature. Right now everything in the React ecosystem just too hacky. There's too many different API's for different stuff you have to learn to get something good going on.

Don't even get me started on Redux Form :-)

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