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Comment by azemetre | Hacker News Reader

Really feels like react has held back frontend development. The idea that everything on the web should be written in react is baffling but I'm sure people thought similar thoughts when jquery or angular were popular.

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Forget the underlying language, the real shift was this idea that every website should be a single page application, which we are now moving away from again but seemingly everyone has forgotten how to do it, so it's being done "the React way".

This could be because of developer fatigue and the trend of forcing backend devs to do fullstack.

Its very hard to keep up with the frequent changes to programming models, new frameworks, CSS libraries (why the heck are they soo many?!) when you also have to design O(Log n) backends, IaC, Observability, LLMOps, etc.

I have come to a compromise and have started advocating for React/Redux/TS/NextJS as the default CRUD application stack so that I can focus on solving real CS problems in the backend that I’m passionate about.

But react is where developer fatigue is most endemic. Since it only does one thing, that typically means you have to import a dozen other libraries that are mostly "flavors of the month" captured in time. You can easily tell when a react project was started based solely on it's dependencies. This is bad because it typically means no two react projects will use the same dependencies.

These dependencies are the root of the issue.

FWIW, I've only ever professionally work with react on the frontend. For nearly 10 years too. My first job I was doing react.createElement() before classes were shortly introduced afterwards.

It's time that we move on to something better, and the react foundation being controlled by private entities while not being an actual democratic foundation is a good omen of what to expect.

> Since it only does one thing, that typically means you have to import a dozen other libraries that are mostly "flavors of the month" captured in time.

By weird happenstance I got a job writing in a half-dead, compiles-to-JS language 5 years ago. There's one way to handle state in it. My view on the libraries you need to handle everything-but-view in React has been "I'll come back to these when the dust settles" and it just never settles.

>> Really feels like react has held back frontend development

Why? How?

>> but I'm sure people thought similar thoughts when jquery or angular were popular

I loved jQuery back in the day, and it helped bringing some native APIs to life thanks to its popularity.

> The idea that everything on the web should be written in react

Says who? There are plenty of choices: vanilla, Lit, Vue, Svelte, Angular, Riot, etc. Some of the alternatives are very good.

None of these have usage numbers that rival react, at least not in the US. I wish it were so because many react libraries can easily support other view libraries with minor modifications to decouple it from react.

Agreed, its become its own terrarium like ecosystem at this point.

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