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Comment by adlpz | Hacker News Reader

It's always the same. Off with the old. Let's use the new. Or new-ish.

I thought we, as in the community, learned a while ago that was a bad path to go down.

That's why there's a resurgence of old-school (yeah, I know...) frameworks like Rails. Or why things like Laravel and the PHP world keep thriving.

Well, React is old now. We know. It's the Rails of the JS world. And it's plenty good enough.

If you know JS/TS and are comfy in that, just use React. Don't feel bad for not using whatever shiny new thing is trendy now. Who cares.

No one ever got fired for choosing react, as some other commenter said.

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> I thought we, as in the community, learned a while ago

If I’ve learned anything in my twenty years programming, it’s that the development community never learns anything for more than about twenty minutes. There’s too much turnover without a great mechanism for handing down folklore and war stories.

This.

I’ve been think about this a lot. Like how htmlx is reinventing something called pjax (though better). There’s many other examples. It’s a lot of newer programmers never investigating the “lore”. I don’t think it’s part of CS curriculum, and boot camps certainly don’t teach it. Forget how things they are using works. It’s woefully common for js devs to not understand how variable referencing works. (Which is super important for reactivity)

> No one ever got fired for choosing react

Well, the current top commenter says:

> I lost my last job because of it and all associated technical debt.

But I don't think a tool should be blamed there :)

But as someone that just learned (learns) react, the useThis and useThat stuff is confusing and lots of details to know how to write it so it doesn't do useless re-renders. It takes time to read and practice all of that.

> No one ever got fired for choosing react, as some other commenter said.

That's supposed to be a pejorative, to describe how what management wants is rarely correlated with what's good or useful. 'Ignore shiny stuff' is the rallying cry when the shiny stuff is less performant and harder to use; as TFA illustrates, the thing about React is everything is more performant and easier to use than it. Where is the value in using React instead of Svelte for new development? If it is just that you already know it, what do you think of TFA's assertions about learnability?

The difference between React and Rails is, well, pretty much every mentioned negative attribute of React - Rails neither is terrible for performance, nor is full of hidden pitfalls, nor requires lots of boilerplate for simple actions, nor is incompatible with most Ruby libraries, etc.

I really think 'new stuff bad' rhetoric here is being divorced from every real reason usually backing it. 'React is good enough' is like someone saying 'MongoDB is good enough' - no it isn't, it was a huge step in the wrong direction and everything invented since it is moving towards more streamlined versions of the old ways of doing things. You explicitly reference the resurgence of old-school stuff, without noticing that it the thing it is specifically a rejection of is React.

> The difference between React and Rails is, well, pretty much every mentioned negative attribute of React - Rails neither is terrible for performance, nor is full of hidden pitfalls, nor requires lots of boilerplate for simple actions, nor is incompatible with most Ruby libraries, etc.

You cannot be serious. Every single one of these points is a criticism I've seen leveled at Rails (in many cases on this very website) at some point or another. Performance? People wouldn't shut up about how slow it was compared to traditional server-side languages/runtimes which could do multithreading, or (later on) event-loop-driven runtimes like Node.JS. Hidden pitfalls? I'd like you to meet my friend, Mr. N-Plus-One Query. Boilerplate? I suppose this is a fair point, but on the other hand there were tons of people complaining that there wasn't enough boilerplate- that it was too magical. And incompatibility? Can I point out the libraries that weren't just written specifically to be used within Rails, but actually depended on its heavily-customized initialization and environment preparation?

> People wouldn't shut up about how slow it was compared to traditional server-side languages/runtimes which could do multithreading

? There has never not been multithreading. And yes, people said it was slow, and they were wrong at the time, having confused single-threaded performance with scalability.

> I'd like you to meet my friend, Mr. N-Plus-One Query

This is a general problem in all ORMs, it's got nothing to do with Rails and the closest anyone has ever come to solving it is LINQ, which still isn't very close.

> Can I point out the libraries that weren't just written specifically to be used within Rails, but actually depended on its heavily-customized initialization and environment preparation?

You can, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the point: there are Rails libraries that don't work outside Rails, but Rails is not incompatible with wide swathes of non-Rails libraries. The problem with React is not the quantity of React-only packages, it is that many non-explicitly-React-only packages don't work.

To be fair, react was badly conceived and designed from the start and has aged poorly since.

I’m all for not moving from one hot tech of the day to the next hot tech of the days.

But let’s not stop on react.

> If you know JS/TS and are comfy in that

…there are better options than react.

> No one ever got fired for choosing react, as some other commenter said.

The the extent that’s true, I think it’s only in the sense that choosing react is more like a symptom of the shortcomings that get people fired.

Anyway, it’s the same urge to follow the heard that made react popular in the first place that will lead to its decline. New shiny things are calling. I hope we collectively choose better this time.

Well, I work for a Fortune 100 company and our standard is Vue, so, yes, using React could potentially get me fired ;-)

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