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Comment by patates | Hacker News Reader

I read the original article and many surrounding discussions & follow-up articles. Not confusion perhaps, but many see it as friction, including the complaints from the original article. From where I'm looking at, it's just a side effect of dealing with concurrency with no threads, what the article also mentions. So, you know, it is what it is, at the end? Now we have people coming up with different definitions of color (react hooks, in your case) and complaining that it's bad?

This is like when you are doing embedded programming, holding the API functions you need to call in a special sequence to the same standard as people writing their own DSLs with templates.

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I'm not complaining it's bad per se. As I said, it's an observation on their nature.

I would not say it's a different definition of colour. I am somewhat contorting the original definition in the article, but if you compare characteristics listed, many/most of them apply to hooks also

The complaint is that it's not just "function composition" (per GP) at all anymore. You're dealing with "component lifecycles". Composition doesn't really work out with hooks, for reference see any non-toy React codebase.

It's like dealing with event handler registrations. You cannot compose those too, as they are "hooks" for when a specific event occurs.

Hook definitions can be a composition of reusable functions and other hooks, like any event handlers (e => filterKeys('cmd+s, ctrl+s', preventDefault(e)).then(save)). It's possible to break this anology (you can register an event handler in an if branch) but I hope it gets the point across.

> It's like dealing with event handler registrations. You cannot compose those too, as they are "hooks" for when a specific event occurs.

Yes, and those are frequently annoying also. Literally the point of the article is the friction they introduce and questioning whether there are better ways to do things. Sometimes there are.

The whole reason that hooks were created was that they could composed, as opposed to stuff like renderprops or mixins. When you create a custom hook that uses a useState and a useEffect, that's composition. They have the caveat that they can only be composed into new hooks, but that's just like async functions only being able to be called from other async functions.

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