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Comment by cnasc | Hacker News Reader

> We don't have any hyper-fancy interactive components that would require heavy JS libraries. And yet... we develop in React.

Is React really a "heavy" library? https://bundlephobia.com/package/react@19.1.0

> The React view took me 52 minutes, plus I later found out that I'd forgotten a damn type on some interface that's a shallow copy of our model.

This sounds like bad architecture, nothing about React would necessitate this. And if your typechecker isn't catching missing types, then it sounds like your types aren't adding much value.

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Whenever someone presents an anecdote like this, there is always someone who says “but then you are doing react wrong”.

Ok, so why is it possible to do it so wrong so often then? That sounds like a downside of the tool. It is a sharp knife. That doesn’t mean there is no place for react, but it also doesn’t mean we have to wipe it under the rug and pretend like it is everybody else’s fault.

I never read a story about it taking an hour to add a field to a form in Rails and it only taking 2 minutes in react. I’ve experienced the other way around for years though. So there is some truth to it. Let’s embrace the truth and look for what react brings us despite this.

> “but then you are doing react wrong”

My objection is not that they are doing React wrong, it’s that their complaint is incoherent because there is literally nothing about React that could make this task take an hour. React isn’t a form library. You write the markup for an html input element, if it’s a controlled input you have a trivial one-line change event handler, and you have a submit event handler. Any additional complexity here isn’t coming from React, and managing to overcomplicate such a basic thing and misidentify the source of the complexity absolutely speaks to a skill issue.

This is especially funny in a thread where posters hold up Rails as a paragon of quality and efficiency.

It took me an hour to add a link to the page because I had to learn about how the React Router works and learn how to set it up for the page I was on. With HTML it takes a couple of minutes, no need to set up props, pull in a library. I just create the link and the anchor tag and bam! Just like that I'm done!

I'm working on a React code base that literally uses over 100 lines of code to navigate to the next page. It also takes about 20 lines of code to have a link. It seems like React devs have never programmed outside of React.

I do like front end libs. I use them sometimes for the right context. But all the business apps I've worked on have never needed a front end lib. With web components even less so than before as the state based interactions that are local to that input element or some other element doesn't need a full blown framework.

My favorite front end lib right now is VanJS. It feels like writing straight vanilla JS without the cruft of writing actual vanilla JS. HTMX is good too, if you are working with back end state but need a little more smooth interaction. Of course, Datastar, html-form, etc all work too.

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