Comment by conorh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by conorh | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree. Do you remember the days when J2EE was the hot stuff? Popularity comes and goes and is not necessarily correlated with whether something is a good idea or not.

Over the last 15-20 years or so as a web development shop we've gone through Prototype, Jquery, Backbone, Angular, Vue and now React for JS frameworks. We've mostly settled on React lately. Our experience is however that it is wildly overused where it is not needed and adds significant time to development. Features that should take a week to build now suddenly have complex client side state management requirements (to name one issue) and take several weeks. We've seen this in several projects while working alongside experienced developers.

We do use React extensively and we find the sweet spot is in smaller components on a page, or highly interactive sections, things without lots of shared state, but it often seems like web developers have one hammer and it is not the right one.

> Features that should take a week to build now suddenly have complex client side state management requirements (to name one issue)

This sounds like bad system design rather than a problem of React.

In general, I find React hate massively overblown. The problem seems mostly to be that everyone is using it, and "everyone" in the case of frontend devs is all over the place in terms of how they got there, what they know to do, and what they know not to do. If you're not careful, all of the JS ecosystem can give you a lot of rope to hang yourself with. The relative accessibility of webdev is a blessing and a curse.

This sounds a lot like the days in web dev before Ruby on Rails came along.

When they (and django) took the web dev world by storm they were prescriptive and told developers how to do something, not just giving them a bunch of tools where you had to build your own app lifecycle, usually massively over-engineered. A whole load of mental overhead disappeared.

Just before Rails, etc. everyone was going on about Factories and the Gang of Four and people were building crazy startup patterns on their webapps using Singletons.

> J2EE was the hot stuff

Whenever everybody except me seems to love something and I just don’t get it, I remember CORBA...

Ah, the heady days back when everybody bought books written by Don Box which only Don Box could understand!

(Edit: yeah, of course, that was DCOM not CORBA, but anyway, that's where I flashed back to. :-) )

I really like Svelte because of what you are describing. It feels almost like writing normal JS/CSS/Html but you get access to some QoL features that make writing JS easier

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