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Comment by yladiz | Hacker News Reader

Am I wrong to feel that this response is written a bit flippantly? Of course, it's his personal blog, but considering he's writing as a member of the React team (and seemingly writing on their behalf as he includes the word "we" in the second sentence) it really feels a bit unpolished and disrespectful. The use of emojis is really strange, and reading phrases like, "How many components do you have," and quoting "skeptical" and "doing your job," reads defensively and sarcastically, not something I want to see in a public post from a React dev member.

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I don't see it as disrespectful in the slightest. It looks like a response to some strawman arguments (eg. React 16 being a complete rewrite) and obvious but rather minor things (eg. className).

Also, if I understand it correctly, the original author is a maintainer of a competing framework, heavily inspired by React. So, this is not exactly an impartial account of an 'experienced dev'. Maybe I'm reading too much into that but it's not something I like seeing in the FOSS world.

Thanks for feedback. I agree I got too defensive, so I edited the post to be less flippant. (Didn’t expect it to jump to HN in an hour.)

I do use emojis all the time in personal communication but I guess it doesn't read very well so I removed them.

The question about components wasn’t meant to be an insult but I can understand how one could see it that way, so I removed it.

Sorry!

A bigger concern for me is the grating cheerfulness in what is a very critical article.

Don't pretend you're not fighting fire with fire with this article. You're mad and you're showing it. When you say stuff like...

>>To sum up, I love that you brought up these concerns in an article.

I don't believe you! Disingenuous.

(You should also think about whether or not the Riot.js author is worth responding to. Just because he's a framework author doesn't mean that framework has ever been held in high regard.)

My motivation was to address common misconceptions around React ecosystem. I'm genuinely happy people bring them up (since that's how we learn about the issues).

To me, reading posts filled with frustration serves as a motivation to improve things. I didn't reply to "fight with fire": I see these kinds of posts every week or two. But I replied this time because I think it was also important to separate real issues from the factual inaccuracies (that get a life of their own once somebody writes an article).

Some bitterness did come through, and I removed it. But I'm not lying when I tell you I'm happy people are sharing their concerns with React. It's all for the best. :-)

Hey Dan, thanks for replying back to me! The main reason that I felt it was strange was that it didn't feel like your personal post, which I feel warranted more professional/reserved writing. The way the current post is written is a lot better (it also does feel more like a personal blog post now), and I appreciate you took the time to rewrite it when you didn't have to. It really has a different tone now, and now that feels a lot less defensive and flippant wrt the original post. Thanks for all the work on React, excited to check out React 16!

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