Comment by chrshawkes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrshawkes | Hacker News Reader

I've been writing React professionally for 5 years straight and I'm absolutely sick of it. I haven't spent enough time with Svelte but I'm sick of React and all the noobs who swear by it. I'm sick of it spinning around in circles and nobody getting anywhere. I'm sick of terrible SPA's consisting of a pile of bandaids stacked on top of one another. I'm sick of testing it with tools like Enzyme. If React were so great, I'd expect to see better things coming out of Facebook. They do one thing well, steal and sell users data. Everything else was bought. Honestly, just sick of Facebook. I was more productive writing stateful apps using C# and ASP.NET with jQuery. In fact, 9/10 we don't need stateful UI's nor React.

GraphQL sucks too. Good luck setting up caching. For instance, hey we forgot caching is important, now that the architecture doesn't allow for it since it uses a single api endpoint... the talked about solution is to use localStorage or sessionStorage. JS is a huge noobfest and those that think React is the answer to everything, probably haven't been in this game long enough.

I too have been using react professionally for the last 5 years and I have the opposite take on it - I still love it as much as when I started using it. I'm a solo dev so I get to control quality end-to-end, perhaps this is where our difference in opinion stems from.

I have no doubt there is tons of awful react code out there written by noobs but the same can be said for practically any software engineering endeavor.

I'll concede that it takes time + effort to understand how to best use react but it's merely a tool and you need experience and insight to understand how best to use your tools. I try to use as little state as possible and use functional components everywhere I can. Hooks have been a big help.

I agree about having reservations with GraphQL, it doesn't seem ready for primetime to me although I'm keeping a close eye on it because I like the underlying concept.

JS is a "huge noobfest" imo because webdev is so accessible and prevalent. But today's noobs are tomorrow's professionals ;) Typescript has been a very welcome development to encourage better dev practices.

> I too have been using react professionally for the last 5 years and I have the opposite take on it...

I'm with you mostly. When I started React close to 5 years ago it was PAINFUL. Coming from mostly jQuery (single library and I'm on my way) to trying to figure out gulp, bower, webpack, babel, etc. The tooling has much improved with the release of `create-react-app`. I can't exactly say the tooling has become better as much as it has been hidden away and the defaults are mostly ideal. Yesterday I had a huge headache trying to figure out why my treeshaking wasn't working (it was bundling 1.5mb of icons into my app). Turns out I was using an old version of `react-scripts` and with it an older webpack which I may have noticed sooner had I hand-built the tooling like the old days of React.

It has become impressively complex with all of the moving parts that are required for a React app these days. Webpack alone is not for the faint of heart with all of the configuration and babel-hell that code (and other files) has to flow through. Without `create-react-app`, I would probably have left React long ago, which would be disappointing because I enjoy the syntax, hooks, readability. I've tried Angular and absolutely hated it, perhaps Svelte would be interesting to me.

I definitely agree the tooling for modern JS can be a huge PITA. Once it's all setup life is great and productivity soars but I completely sympathize with beginners feeling lost and even experienced devs turned off from the opaque complexity.

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