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Comment by buster | Hacker News Reader

Shows how far too many developers don't question claims but take this stuff for real. Put it on a nice website with a cool domain name, fake some statistics and voila: Your new, web3.0 tech is out there. Bonus points if you are Google/Facebook/Apple.

Even if the article itself will be debunked as wrong, i feel that too many tech-savy people are too superficial.

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I think the bigger appeal of React isn't the "performance." It's the fact that you can reason about your app as if you are re-rendering the entire application with every change in state. That way you never have to think about mutating the DOM, and you have less places to screw up.

If you actually re-rendered the whole app with every state change, it wouldn't be performant, but with the virtual DOM, it's totally feasible. It is definitely unfortunate that developers take statistics for granted (I'm guilty of this), but it doesn't undermine the usefulness of the framework.

> It's the fact that you can reason about your app as if you are re-rendering the entire application with every change in state. That way you never have to think about mutating the DOM, and you have less places to screw up.

This is really no different than Angular's value proposition - everything is bound to the DOM via the scope and re-renders automatically with every change in state.

Ah yes, BUT you can't deny that one of the major selling points of React after its announcement was its superior performance due to its DOM magic. May be one selling point, but nevertheless a major selling point.

Now, every one says "oh, but i don't care for the performance, i like that React can do XYZ" instead of proving the author wrong. Why? Because in truth 99% of developers would have no idea how to do it. I'm convinced that there is a significant amount of web developers who wouldn't even know how to write a web page in plain JS, CSS and HTML without the use of a myriad of tools that generate stuff for them. Same for other areas. If not for aphyr most people wouldn't even know how to test a database.

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