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Comment by bnt | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been holding off from React for a long time, but also after reading the “boring technology”, I came to realize React is in fact - here to stay.

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It'll be gone in 5 years. It's getting too big and too slow. Also, the react team managed to add hooks and useEffect in a way that makes it very easy to accidentally send your app into an infinite loop and not know why.

> It'll be gone in 5 years. It's getting too big and too slow

Funny, that's what everyone said 5 years ago. I'll bet on React to be here for another decade, no problem - there's just way too much momentum. In a way, it's Rails all over again (that's a positive).

Rails burned out in under 10 years. The reason I say React will be gone in another 5 years is because it's already been popular for 5 and the muttering has started. Do you remember Adobe Flex? React is following a shockingly similar path and timeline.

> Rails burned out in under 10 years

It may not be the glory days, but Rail's is still going strong 13 years later. React, however, has reached a popularity many times larger than RoR ever did.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...

There has never been a project (I can think of), other than the Linux kernel, with the resources that companies and developers have put behind React.

> Do you remember Adobe Flex

Flex never came close to either RoR or React popularity, and was propelled mostly by the dying wave of ActionScript programmers from the aughts after cell phones killed the Flash game market.

So is Flex[0]. What's your point? It's not popular anymore and hundreds if not thousands of code bases are being converted from both of these technologies into something else.

[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...

> What's your point?

Seriously? Adobe Flex was a closed-source and proprietary commercial offering capitalizing on the prior decade's popularity of Flash.

React is open source with a vast and robust ecosystem of even more open source to go along with it. It couldn't be more night & day.

> Adobe Flex was a closed-source and proprietary

That confirms it: you aren't old enough to remember Flex. It was open source.

Please don't get involved in flamewars on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry. That was not my intent.

Not until version 3 in 2008, after which it became Apache Flex. Maybe you should try to get both your facts and attitude straight.

Please don't get involved in flamewars on HN. Personal attacks in particular will get you banned here, so please don't do those.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> React, however, has reached a popularity many times larger than RoR ever did.

> https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...

I'm not sure this chart is very good evidence of this claim. There are so many other things named "react" -- Nike React shoes, Kids React videos, reactionary politics, and so on -- that it's a bit like claiming Trump.js is the most popular JavaScript library in the world because of this chart: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...

Still writing Rails today, nothing seems to come close, except maybe Phoenix sortof

Hooks definitely need to be deeply learned, and has one of the steeper learning curves in React. But at its core, its solving a hard problem (lifecycle side-effects), in a way that is more functional, and produces more maintainable code. Thats a fair trade-off imho. And honestly, once you understand them, the infinite loops are deterministic and understandable.

If you want a component-based view library that is written in js, and you are happy to take on the task of assembling a build-system, styling system, routing and of course state-management, I can't see much of an architectural improvement you could make over React.

If you want batteries included - go with Vue.

If you want the Ruby/spring opinion and batteries included go with Ember.

Svelte looks kinda cool. But it seems to sit deep in the browser spec, and in my NAIVE opinion, it doesn't seem hold the component abstraction as something even valuable. It just wants you to script away. Which, is just movement within a trade-off space - if it suits you go for it.

The component abstraction is primary with Svelte. Each file is a component and only one component. This means the only ceremony you need to create a component is to create a new file. It's a perfect solution in my opinion.

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