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Comment by tomstuart | Hacker News Reader

Not the OP, but I'll state the obvious on their behalf.

The number one thing that you (and Facebook) could do to help people learn React, and combat the perception that it requires overly complex tooling, is write a tutorial that shows how to use React entirely in-browser without any build toolchain. A static HTML file, some <script> tags pointing at a CDN — done. No distractions, nothing to download, nothing to install, nothing to run, just a JavaScript library that makes it easier to write view templates.

It would make it even easier to get into if that tutorial were written entirely in ES5, but you could use babel-standalone if you felt that JSX and ES6 were important enough.

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Thanks for replying! Our official tutorial was actually exactly that for _years_, but it didn't seem to help much. I get the sentiment though and maybe we can find another way to make it work.

Offering an alternative point of view: I would really like if the tutorial at least pointed towards documentation on what do I need and why, and the right way to set these things up between Babel and Webpack, as well as Typescript.

Maybe my use case is rarer, I don't know, but if I want to do things right, I want to understand what I'm setting up. Do I really need babel? If I use Typescript, do I still need it? etc...

I understand this doesn't have much to do with React per se but if these components are a definitive part of the ecosystem people work with, there is value in at least telling people where to find a high quality explanation for how they fit together.

I think this post is spot on. I remember having a quick exploratory play with React back when the tutorial was like that and I thought it was great. Then when I came back to actually use React in a project the tutorial had changed and all of the sudden it felt like a big learning curve. Vue had just been adopted by Laravel and I was able to get everything I wanted to do by just including some scripts.

I've since learned more about compiling and including other resources so could probably handle the React tooling and requirements now but back when I started it was a big stumbling block.

This is why I am using Vue and never gave React a second thought. Everyone "says" JSX is optional but there is no practical way to invest in React without having to deal with it.

JSX is a breeze though. The trial-by-fire for me was handing a bunch of ugly components to our designer who only knew HTML/CSS/JS. He picked it up no problem.

And to me using JSX is infinitely better than have to use opaque template directives like Angular and Vue.

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