Why is routing, of all things, in such need of constant development? I say this as someone that’s made SPAs with Vue a lot and occasionally React.
However this makes some people vocally angry, because in theory a developer should know every single packages in the world, but never the internals. Only people of a higher class or caste should be allowed to release stuff to the world. The rest are peasants. How dare they. /s
This won't be popular: but tech self-proclaimes itself as innovative and then wastes time mucking around reinventing wheel after wheel after wheel.
Sure, the self-edu is helpful. Of course. But does that always have to a wheel we've seen before going down a road we've been down before?
Note: Not trolling or ranting. Just looking for new thoughts and ideas.
Don't forget React is a Facebook product.
In this same thread there is a comment about how this little code snippet "throws away backward compatibility, plus everything else".
New tech has to have backwards compatibility to even be taken serious by most people. But backwards compatibility requires not only reinventing the wheel, but also having it being on the exact same size and material as before so it fits where it was used.
The only way to satisfy both of the groups above is to evolve tech that already exists and implement new findings in already existing libraries, but that will also enrage a lot of people. An example: React Hooks.
The reason people say this is because the scale of the problem is much, much worse in front-end javascript than in most other language communites and it's a real problem for people attempting to get to grips with best practice.
If your explanation was correct then we'd see the same problem everywhere at the same scale but there's something about front-end javascript that seems to exacerbate this issue.
About being uncharitable: IMO this constant mischaracterization of frontend is the real uncharitable thing here.
I also do a lot of backend work and even the most "traditionally stable" programming languages (or frameworks) have a lot of churn in libraries, frameworks, patterns, toolchains, deployment methods and architectures. Which is "fine", that's how programming works!
But heck, I worked recently on a 8 year old Rails app that had four different methods/libraries/frameworks being used to wrap business code. But in the frontend that would be extremely rare.
If anything the frontend has been quite stable for the last 7 years or so when we settled on mostly React or Vue. The only real big change was Hooks, and even that was incremental and was an attempt to solve real problems in the ecosystem.
You don't need any of the libraries in the article to make a good React app/website. Period. No, not even React-Router or Redux. And those two are probably the only ones that you'll see lots of companies/devs that actually ship stuff using. And both of them are not even that complicated, as is demonstrated in this article for the Router. Redux is also quite simple (hence why there's so many alternative implementations).
If anything the ones doing the gaslighting are the ones saying that we devs need to use ultra-complex build systems and gigantic libraries to make a "real app". It's the gaslighting of saying simple architectures "won't ever work" mixed with machismo of "real programmers do X".
Sure, if you want the complexity that comes with using those "must-use" libraries, feel free to have it. I won't say you're wrong by doing so. Maybe you REALLY need all 14 of them, although I doubt it. But please stop assuming that everyone is doing the same or has to. Nor try to deny the reality of me and lots of others getting things done without "14 must use libraries". Because that is the definition of gaslighting.
The React ecosystem looks like the crypto / nft space to outsiders. Nobody seems to agree on anything, no two projects look alike, it’s just this endless loop of people reinventing the same core bits over and over again for the past ten years.
I’m happy for you that this hasn’t been you experience but don’t tell me that the React ecosystem is stable. The reputation of the React ecosystem for many years has famously been that it’s a house of cards.
You, on the other hand seems to be claiming that the only reality that matters is the one that matches your own biases about an ecosystem that yourself seems to only participate from the periphery of SEO-spam blog posts.
It's funny that you're started by calling me a gaslighter when it is exactly what you're doing.
Claiming that React looks like Crypto/NFT only makes sense from anyone taking advice from such blogs.
The core bits have definitely not been reinvented, as the library itself hasn't really changed much to the outside in eight years other than the adoption of hooks and a few incremental advances.
Please spare the condescending "I’m happy for you" part. You're clearly not part of the industry that is using React in a stable way, and you don't seem to want to be part of. Even if your description of the React ecosystem were true, you're clearly on a personal vendetta here and has no intention to see anything change for the better.
There's nothing special about JS, but there is something special about being forced to use JS.
we do. Every C app implements its own linked list or hash table library. The entire Scheme community is nothing but toy interpreters of various stages of completeness (you can tell a project is serious when they implement call/cc). How many game engines do you think exist? It's a meme that game devs like to spend more time on their pet game engine than actually making their game. How many ORMs do you think exist for <language-of-choice>? At least half a dozen. At least. For any given language. Python, Ruby, Go[1]. ORMs, in particular, seem to get created over and over again. Probably because they are trivial to implement and allows one to voice their opinions on SQL abstraction (bike shedding).
As someone coming from an Angular shop, I started a new job a few months ago that uses React on the frontend. My main gripe so far is there is no one "way" to do X in a react-based app. For an enterprise with lots of developers, Angular seems like a better fit - unless you want to spend months coming up with standards. Angular has its own issues of course - it's much more rigid and has a steeper learning curve.
Now there are solutions comparable to Vue/etc which use React -- Next.js, Create React App, etc. Comparisons, tradeoffs, and criticisms are totally fair there. Just don't blame React for churn in third party implementations of features outside of its purview.
As a side note, I love that React is so narrowly scoped. It lets the community build on, experiment with, and coalesce around amazing solutions to other big features outside of React's scope. That Darwinian approach has created broad front end solutions that to me are a joy to use compared to similarly featured frameworks like Angular.
Sadly, for reasons that remain a mystery to me it’s one of those things like Apple or crypto where some of its loudest fans have decided to make it a part of their identity rather than a tool they enjoy using.
Other frameworks have adopted some of those concepts in different ways, and it works quite well. Other technologies have other ways of solving the same problems, and they also work! Of course, it is absolutely not perfect and doesn't solve "all problems", but that's how mature technologies generally are.
Modern browsers have tried to provide a competing technology with WebComponents, but despite being native to the platform and embraced en masse not only by browser makers but by large companies, it hasn't taken off like React. Please take a time to reflect as to why something that is "there" isn't as widely used as something that requires a 50kb library to even start. And no, it's not a conspiracy, nor it is marketing. There are very good technical reasons for that.
About the "fans" part: please look at the mirror. You seem to be projecting a lot here. People use React and other similar libraries because it gets the job done. A lot of your posts seem to be about competing technologies, or are anti-Apple, or anti-something. Criticism is perfectly fine, but you're the one making hating something part of your identity and the projection is blurring your ability to empathise with what others are saying.
Because requirements change. In the last few years there was a lot of churn in React due to the introduction of async rendering and server-side rendering, and React routers were strongly affected by both of those changes.