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Comment by boringg | Hacker News Reader

So I can't discern if React is a loved or hated technology (also it doesn't have to be binary). At the company I was working at the front end devs brought in React and were super excited about it, but reading a couple comments in here it seems like people have some reservations.

I haven't invested the time into as I don't have a use case but I keep hearing about and now get the sense it isn't necessarily worth looking at until i have a needed case.

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I think HN's comments of front end type topics tends towards 'back end focused folks talking about front end'.

I love HN, but I would really be wary of taking too much front end type commentary seriously as it comes from HN comments.

Now sometimes the comments are GREAT, that's not to say it is all bad, but other times the comments on front end topics on HN is like walking into a meeting with a bunch of managers and non front end focused folks who got together to list their gripes ;) In those cases I often don't say anything because the ranting is on and nobody really cares.

Edit: This was longer but I decided I didn't want to go that far down the meta rabbit hole.

It always reminds me of the Simpsons quote: "Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.". I've seen many people here more willing to believe that all front-end devs are clueless than admit they might not understand modern web-dev.

You can tell how lopsided the discussion is here by how many people here think it's some sort of badge of honor that they're a "back-end guy" who barely even touches the client instead of feeling sheepish how far removed they are from the user experience and thus the concerns of how hard it is to build a good client and the tools that improve it.

A good example of this is how many "back-end guys" here think it's Javascript and web tech that are hard/annoying instead of all client tech due to the nature of building user-facing software that has to run on a 1,000,000 devices instead of sysops-facing software that runs on one server.

Be wary of anyone who just peddles downsides without acknowledging trade-offs. They don't have much experience (You can have 20+ years of dev experience while inexplicably avoiding this sort of realization). Right now there's someone in the top thread saying they literally don't know a single company that didn't regret using Angular/React. Oh bother. This sort of person just has to ask, but they don't because they prefer to cling on to their little sneering world view.

If someone seriously can't say why anyone could prefer React (or any other tech, like JS or PHP or jQuery) without a cynical disparaging trait like these people are just idiots, simply write this person off and seek more even-keeled opinions about the world.

My personal professional view is that I found web frontend development quite disgusting between the days of static HTML and React. The frontend apps built by my colleagues using jQuery or Angular seemed to have no structure and seemed quite fragile. Of course, one could use any tool well, but in my world it was not happening.

From my point of view, React and JavaScript improvements in later versions have made frontend development more tolerable and even interesting.

People are more likely to chime in if they hate it.

I think most people are happy or content with React - but honestly, it doesn't matter. Nearly every job listing I've seen or applied to asked for React experience (if the position asked for frontend skills). It's so ubiquitous in the coastal US tech industry that if you want to be a frontend dev, you're limiting your career choices by refusing to learn it.

> People are more likely to chime in if they hate it.

Or if they love it.

The silent majority will just see it as a tool fit for certain jobs and not for others and wonder what all the fuss is about.

I did web dev from 2012-2015, until I moved into doing security engineering. I started doing some React tutorials on the side in December and now have a small project at work that uses it. I do not consider myself a web dev, so I will take any actual web dev's opinions over mine, but React seems nice!

At first it seemed a bit complicated, but looking back at the stack I left behind in 2015 (LAMP, numerous JS libraries, Bootstrap, some Ruby was starting to creep in), it actually is a little more consolidated.

I guess I should bookmark my comment and check back in a year from now in case I am still using React and see how my thoughts change by then!

My impression is that developers love it because it makes things easier to develop, but users not so much because it makes interacting with web pages even slower than it already is.

Also, it makes webpages a pain to scrape, consumes more RAM and CPU, and recursive module dependencies can become a huge attack surface.

If your project requires high interactivity, with lots of moving pieces, you'll love it. Particularly unidirectional data flow is a breeze to work with. If you need a static/basic CRUD site with few popups, you may prefer plain HTML/JS.

~~People don't complain about things they have not used.~~ People complain about things they have used so, if you have heard complains, it means a lot of people are using it, and using it despite those complains.

So, you should consider that there is some benefit which outweighs the complains

UPDATE: original line came out wrong. and was flat out incorrect

People definitely complain about things they have not used.

> People don't complain about things they have not used

Whew can I get on the version of the internet you're on? Sounds nice.

Many love it, many hate it, and many are indifferent to it.

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