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Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

> Not entirely sure that would have been a negative outcome. React is horrible.

Oh sweet summer child. It's ancestors were so much worse. They had to deal with Microsoft Internet Explorer

jQuery. bootstrap. And if that doesn't strike fear in your heart, ANGULAR!

Aw come on jQuery was fun! Remember those big long chained commands? Remember how suddenly you could just select anything off the page, using cas selectors? Remember how much easier ajax and animation and dom manipulation and events were with jQuery?

Meh, to a point. Once things crossed a certain threshold of dynamic behavior the state handling became a nightmare. Now, arguably few services needed that much dynamism.

Hard disagree. Front end development was an order of magnitude easier better faster before FB pushed React into the dev mindspace.

No one is stopping you from going back to jQuery. But there's a reason the world moved on to React and others

The main reasons being facebook’s popularity and herd mentality.

You think that's the only reason React took off? Have you ever tried to build a complex web application using only jQuery?

Yeah, I've done it many times successfully, drag and drop interfaces, form builders, dynamic form inputs, animations, etc. It's 10x easier with vanilla JS and sprinklings of jQuery.

Believe it or not, gmail was a much faster cleaner better interface before they switched to Angular, and FB worked much better and was way less buggy and slow before they switched to React. The reason the mega-caps pushed their use was to offload processing power to the client, which saves them server costs. Front end JS frameworks don't solve a problem almost every other company has, hence why they had to be pushed by FB/Google, and didn't grow organically from the open source community.

I suspect when you want complex modals and chat dialogs you'll notice jQuery starting to bend under the weight. It can be done, though not as well as more modern, albeit large frontend tools.

No. Both of those things can be done with light JS use. A framework is definitely not needed.

It seems to me that Facebook has put out many many open source libraries, but React is the only one that has taken off in a bigway outside FB. People generally scoffed at FB technically since they were built on PHP.

I think bringing the functional programming approach and princinpled state management to frontend was just something that the time was ripe for.

(Also React was much different back then, before hooks, etc).

I always use sprinkles of jQuery over React/Angular/Front End Framework de jour if given the choice.

These tools you mention are worse but that doesnt mean react is great. The two statements dont negate each other.

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