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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

I agree about the principles but not about how it happens on the real world. Many front-end jobs now require you to know at least one front-end framework (normally React), which is a totally different and focused problem-solving tool. Before you had jQuery that scaled from small, personal projects to mid-size projects. This worked great as a learning progression, however now you have React (and others) that don't make sense for small projects and are a bit overkill for mid-size projects.

So new developers get thrown in this crazy world where they have to learn a thing that has no real practical use just because they want a job in the field. IMHO, new tools must make things easier for everyone and specially for newcomers, while React seems to make large-scale problems easier but a LOT harder for beginners.

And finding a new job is a problem that we all have from time to time.

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I really dunno - I find React to work really, really well in the small and medium projects where I do (any) web work. Coming to React after years away from frontend development, and avoiding it because of things like jQuery, was really awesome because it demands that you enforce separations of concerns in a way that really appeals to me.

Hell, I generate HTML email with React, now. No reason not to; it's great. Simple, understandable tree of reusable components that have understandable data flows--sign me right up.

The biggest problem with it is the initial activation energy of a new project, which is partially solved through create-react-app and largely solved by doing it once in a replicable way. (I've been creating React projects off of the same base for quite awhile now.)

Tooling and build process is still a problem for trying out react in personal small/micro projects. I miss the days when I just drop in jquery.min.js and boom! We can hack something to our heart's content.

I agree. I have been meaning to try choo or hyperapp for small projects since they are so simple and small

Dunno, the only apps I can think of that don't benefit from React are just toy apps or little things like <form> upgrades.

You're way off if you think React doesn't work for anything other than large apps.

I've been bitten this many times where my "little app" grew, and the non-framework code complexity would grow quadratically where I regretted not just using a framework like React in the first place. So when I hear "React is just for large apps", I can't take it very seriously.

If all you have is hammer...

Parent said it is overkill, a different thing from what you're reading. And boy, as somebody who doesn't already know it, is that right.

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