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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think it’s React that’s responsible for complicated code. I’ve never seen a large GUI app written in any language or toolkit that isn’t super complicated. I’ve dealt with much worse horrors with “vanilla JS” (aka, a home grown framework that does everything a bit worse in every way) than with React or Svelte.

I too have personal project code that is sunshine and roses compared to my Business React day job, but that could also be because my personal project app serves 2 users, is developed by 2 people over a year, and my Business React application serves 100 million users, is developed by ~300 people over 8 years.

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Hooks are complicated to reason about and Sevelte has advantage of a compiler. It can decide whatever syntax and then transform it into JS so there's that which allows Svelte components to be in three distinct parts - logic, markup and styles.

One advantage of vanilla JavaScript is its long-term stability. A developer can often revisit code written years ago, make a quick tweak to add a feature, and move on. It will probably feel as familiar and straightforward as it did back then, with new APIs and syntax improvements adoptable in small steps. By contrast, a project built on the framework of the moment might not age as gracefully; the build process can feel outdated or cumbersome as standards evolve. Of course, if you’re able to keep everything up-to-date, it’s less of an issue, but that’s not always feasible. And while vanilla JS may not be ideal for a project scaled to 100 million users, it’s a practical choice for many situations.

> By contrast, a project built on the framework of the moment might not age as gracefully; the build process can feel outdated or cumbersome as standards evolve

For frameworks in general perhaps, React in particular has been fantastically stable since very shortly after it was first released, which is over 10 years ago now.

> By contrast, a project built on the framework of the moment might not age as gracefully; the build process can feel outdated or cumbersome as standards evolve

Why can this not be true for 'vanilla js'?

If you're not using a framework, you're almost definitely half-cobbling together you're own ad-hoc framework. Best case scenario, surely that's just as likely to atrophy the same as React/whatever.

Have you seen vanilla js lately?

It's moved on massively as a language, picked up many, many new paradigms.

Going back to code more than a few years old and your newer devs are going to be asking "what's all this var nonsense"?!

Not just that, but the tooling has also evolved and changed.

Good luck trying to get an old project with old versions of Yarn and Gulp working well, where trying to update either breaks the build but using anything other than var confuses the tooling. Provided that you have a build step of any sort (e.g. minifying the assets) and people picked whatever was popular at the time of the project being made.

not sure - I've yet to see any React code that handles large or incomplete state cleanly (think very long lists not loaded into memory)

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