Hacker News Reader

Comment by scambier | Hacker News Reader

Come on, this isn't that hard if you have minimal, or even outdated, web dev knowledge. There is like 3 major frameworks (Angular, React, Vue). Spend a few hours to look how it is to work with each one, make your choice and follow a tutorial. Congrats, you've made your first Single-Page App.

Of course if you've never written a line of code in your life, or if you're angry at the thought of using a dependency manager, you're going to have a hard time. And not only with the web stack.

View on HN

So I've looked into React and the problem I have with it is that it's lauded as "simple" because it's "just a view kit."

However, there are an infinite amount of questions one has to answer when starting a new project:

- I see that state management libraries are in a lot of tutorials and talked about online. Which one do I pick? Redux? MobX? Something smaller? Do I skip it entirely? What are the consequences of that?

- Okay, so how do I deliver "pages" in React? Do I pull in React Router as well? I saw an article on using Hooks to replace RR. Do I do that instead?

- How do I handle authentication? Do I use JWT? Which library? I saw some comments on Hacker News that says JWT is terrible. Do... do I pick something else? I kind of need auth so I cant's skip it. What if I need to do OAuth?

- Do I use TypeScript? What is the scope of work for implementing it into my build pipeline? Is it worth it?

- Build tools. Sure, WebPack is the most popular but a lot of tutorials are for outdated versions. A lot of the times I'm googling "how do I do X webpack" and just get different JSON blobs to plug in.

It's just... so much. I just don't care. I don't want to configure Gulp or WebPack or whatever. I don't want to extensively research every dependency I have to pull in to get a working app. There is Facebook's create-react-app and that's a good start. Vue and Angular don't suffer as much from this because they focus more on being complete packages.

Doesn't matter to me though. Phoenix LiveView provides enough interactivity for me.

All fair questions :-) But you don't sound like a frontend developer. Are you writing something with a UI so complex that you would need React, Vue or Angular to implement it?

In their defense it’s been a year and I’m still learning React. Please don’t act like it’s something you understand in a few hours because it’s not. You might be able to copy-paste the example code and get something that works and sorta seeing what happens but to really understand takes a lot of time.

Assuming that this vanilla js should be familiar for anyone who has only ever written js that interacts with the DOM api:

    document.body.innerHTML = `
      <div>
        Hello world
      </div>
    `;

the React equivalent is no more complex:

    const HelloWorld = () => (
      <div>
        Hello world
      </div>
    );

    ReactDOM.render(<HelloWorld />, document.body);

Add to this a couple of high-level concepts, i.e. that a React component re-renders if its arguments (props) or its internal state change, and you are 70-80% there. Learn the useState and the useEffect hooks, and you are ready to be productive. If you aren't ready for build tools yet and just want to play with the library, take Preact, which has a syntax option that does not require a build step [0]

How many hours should this take?

[0] https://preactjs.com/guide/v10/getting-started

The problem is that React might not exist over a couple of years.

I program for decades. Most of my old stuff using frameworks - say for example, Angular or Jekyll - doesn't work anymore. If I update I end up in a dependency hell that's even worse. It's like XSLT in XML. It will pass. :-)

> The problem is that React might not exist over a couple of years.

I agree with you in principle, but I think I disagree in details. Programming using standard web apis certainly feels more future-proof, and all the power to those who have adopted web components. But React doesn't look like it's going away within the next decade. And even if Facebook somehow implodes, and no other company steps up to support the work of the React core team, React's api has been copied by Preact, which has Google's backing; and JSX has spread even wider. Importantly, React in itself is larger than DOM — it is a reconciler that can be used for canvas/webgl (react-three-fiber), for mobile applications (react-native) and windows applications (react-native-windows). So there is a good indication that React will be with us for a while.

But again, I completely agree that many projects that get started with React don't need to have been.

> I program for decades.

Two decades ago, Perl was a good choice :-) And look where it is now.

We are lucky with the rigorous backwards compatibility of HTML, CSS and javascript. But planning for decades may be a bit of an extreme. I wouldn't like to inherit a frontend project that was written two decades ago and hasn't changed since then.

And yet you completely just proved my point.

If you think one gets to know React or Angular because one can follow a "Getting Started" tutorial for a couple of hours and get it to show an example page then you're in Dunning Kruger territory.

I never said that a tutorial was enough to master a framework, please.

The comment I was replying to was saying:

> there is so much js tooling and documentation and of such wide variety that a year or two would not be enough for even a light review

There's no need to learn the entire ever-evolving JS ecosystem. You pick a sane starting point (a framework tutorial) to get you up and running in a few days, and from there you learn what you _need_.

The trouble for newcomers starts at _which_ framework to hang your hat on. Unless that decision has been made for you by your employer choosing between, Vue, React, Svelte, Alpine, Angular or some additional ankle biters is overwhelming. What's the selection criteria? What's the payoff vs complexity cost of each? What's the support level? Is it coming in vogue (Svelte) or out of fashion (Angular)? Does it mandate additional tools/transpilers/packagers etc and how many? How hard are they to learn? Do they play well with some other tooling that is being used (say Typescript)? Finally how does it all get packaged as an app/website to publish?

It's a complicated mess and even seasoned JS developers struggle to answer the above questions. Oftentimes the justification for choosing a framework is that they had read about it in a forum like HN and wanted to try it. Nothing wrong with that for someone who lives and breathes those things but most people want to just get a CRUD UI up, these things are a massive time sink for what they purport to offer.

If, like you say, these people aren't frontend specialists and don't pick frameworks on the basis of what appears on the front page of HN, why should they reach for a framework as their first port of call anyway? Many conversations on HN seem to turn into an argument between old-school developers, who declare that there's nothing better than good old jquery and Bootstrap, and more hip developers who immediately drag in React, Vue, or Svelte. The middle-ground option of starting with plain modern JS and plain modern CSS is offered relatively rarely. Which is strange — this should be the default for those who are disoriented by the plethora of options on the frontend.

Especially since you suggest that such developers just need to get a CRUD UI up and running. You don't need a js framework for that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com