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Comment by yrgulation | Hacker News Reader

I hope so. A fashion mindset coupled with huge numbers of average programmers led to an adoption of this massively bloated framework.

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Components based approach was pretty much wide spread because of React, we had shitty MVC stuff like angular before it. I wouldn’t call it fashion mind set.

It you think React is bloat I would recommend Preact

Joke’s on you, I write my frontends in my own Rust-to-WASM home-brewed framework. Zero bloat there, I just write 100x the amount of code!

Jokes on you, I just remote desktop them into a Windows machine, from the browser, and then run an electron app from within there.

Not sure if the comment is satire or genuine

It's satire, but I'm flattered.

Oftentimes the people who say this have never done modern frontend development (and many times no frontend development at all!).

Yes, sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes to point out the tune everyone is dancing to out of inertia. If it happens often that people point out this issue then i’d take it a hint and reflect on it. Maybe there is an opportunity for creating something better, radically different not just an iteration, and maybe now is the time for it. We in tech have the personality and culture to re-invent when times are hard.

So I gather you don't use React daily?

It can be as you say sometimes, but most other times, it's akin to Chesterton's Fence or Gell-Mann Amnesia, talking about something without actually knowing anything about it. It's not only wrong, it's useless.

I do, and i have been writing spas since before this madness. It’s real utter shite. We need something better instead of religiously fixating on it. But i do appreciate you making personal assumptions instead if focusing on the core of what i said, and you seem to have confirmed that there is indeed backlash against this untamed beast.

You said "fresh set of eyes" so I assumed you don't use it, my apologies.

I was also speaking generally, not towards React itself. Some people do have some issues with it, but I don't think it should be discarded wholesale as you imply. By all means, use alternatives like Vue, Solid or Svelte, but React is in my opinion wholly superior, at least for someone functionally oriented like me, where f(State) = UI without reactive stream based side effects.

A fresh set of eyes in the sense of your observation that its usually new folks pointing out the many issues this framework is suffering from.

I use an array of frameworks. Anyway there is nothing intellectual in this debate as we are not conceptualising alternatives we are just considering existing tools, a bit like building workers considering different types of hammers. A common issue in the js world.

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