lsalvatore

We wrote enterprise applications with jQuery and Backbone. It didn't scale. React fixed everything. There is no post-React.

I'm not "technology-agnostic"- I only use React, and will only work for companies that use React. React is the best.

Hey actually React has nothing to do with Megacorp at all. We adopted React in 2015 on a small team (less than 10 engineers) as did many other small startups at that time. The decision to use React on a small team is the same as it would be on a large team: It dramatically changes frontend development. It makes this career worth while. I did 5 years before React, and now still using React 7 years after with no competitor in sight.

I don't use React because I'm being forced to. We chose React!

No, the career growth happened in 2015 when we adopted React and stopped endlessly inserting JS and CSS tags from jQuery plugins. Backbone made things worse. Angular made things worse. React objectively changed my life and allowed me to work several remote jobs at once. I watched half a dozen startups adopt React for the better. There is no similar growth or usage to React. React is the king.

> the monstrosity it turned into

Literally what? React is responsible for infinitely scaling frontend features and career growth I never could have imagined.

Bingo. Smart people understand the domain of interview questions (which we know is contrived) and typically can study enough to implement the solutions. It's not always about getting the question right- it's about demonstrating you are smart, but also these questions are core CS fundementals so it also tests that they have a formal education. Anyone can learn Git, JS, but how many can apply a programming language to a complex problem on the spot?

can I get a quick rundown of these guys?

React, Redux, styled-components.

Sure, book a free call with me here: react.school/call

Software engineers that replace things with functionally equivalent things don't get a lot of actual work done and typically aren't employed for very long either. So, the churn had to stop long ago from inside the average high performing company (and professional engineer's mindset). Only when things are really bad (as they were 6 years ago) is it worth rewriting everything. We've done that and it's not happening again. You can follow my work here: react.school

The prevailing view here is that JavaScript is a nightmare to develop with when in fact, there is actually a bit of a golden age going on right now. It's never been more stable and fun to build apps on the web. Maybe I'll write a post about it.

Oh, it's this thread again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29552322

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228904

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26740593

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024799

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691600

Yes, functionality would require skills, and skills require opinionated tools. Opinions require taking a stance, and that's the last thing anyone here wants to do.

You didn't need TypeScript. That was your first mistake. If you had chosen Create-react-app (the official boilerplate) - that's all you need. Hello world right out of the box. Nothing blows up in your face. Nothing mind-boggling. I've never had to ever run eject. Nothing saddening, nothing tiring. In fact- just the opposite. Happiness, joy, energizing React productivity.

JavaScript framework churn (on the frontend) ended 6 years ago. The only thing keeping this meme going is commenters on HN.

Yes I totally understand your point of view. I spent almost a decade paying off a six figure debt for my CS degree. The funniest part? I learned almost nothing about web development in school. No marketable skills that would have really helped me when I first started my actual job! How can I argue this is a good thing?

Well, the best analogy I can think of is a black belt in karate. It takes 10 years or whatever to get that. It has no marketable purpose. Why do it? The answer is more than "to get a job". It's about Discipline. Focus. Intense research into fundamentals. Stretching your limit if what you can learn in a weekend. Writing half a page of assembly code on a piece of paper. Debugging a C program. Red black trees. These have no purpose, but when reflecting on these experiences, I would not trade them for a second for "Intro to Javascript and HTML".

I'm saddened that we're comparing a degree in CS to a subscription to Codecademy.

I am curious if you've gotten a degree yourself, and whether that degree was from a reputable school. My CS degree is one of my proudest and most difficult accomplishments in my life.

The difference in someone with a 4 year CS degree and a bootcamp graduate is jarringly apparent and one that I have uncomfortable experience with.

My following statement will cause me to be downvoted, because the truth makes people uncomfortable. Computer Science education is a rite of passage, like getting a black belt, becoming a priest, doctor or anything else that requires intense study with peers for extended period of time.

The CS degree at a top school is more than a signal, its a badge of honor and respect. You may choose to ignore it to your own peril.

Thanks for the explanation, this makes me profoundly sad and is completely absurd. They call it "minting" which I actually thought was a neat way of putting the image itself on chain which can't be deleted and is permanent, so people spending crazy amounts of money can at least have the piece of mind that what they've bought is immutable. This shouldn't be considered an NFT at all.. imagine if bitcoin was just linking to a bank transaction. In fact- a definition of NFTs: "unique digital asset that is not directly replaceable with another digital asset" - swapping the results of the URL would invalidate this. What is the actual point?

This surely can't be true for the typical image-based NFTs? I thought the entire point is that the full JPEG is embedded in the blockchain, thus not being dependent on any image hosting service.

I wrote jQuery in production for 5 years and then switched to React for 6 years in production at a half dozen companies. In my opinion, nothing can be improved further. I love writing React, it solves every problem you can think of and scales for large codebases.

Prior to React, we were using Backbone, Handlebars and jQuery. It was horrible. Logic was put into Handlebars templates, Backbone models created an unnecessary abstraction, we had to setup our own event handlers for every model -> view change. It just didn't work. JSX solved all these problems.

Frontend-state management with React is not complicated. There is a current trend to trash React because of its perceived complexity. Take it from an experienced React developer- it's easy and fun. Hooks are a short syntactic sugar over its lifecycle methods. Once you learn hooks, there isn't much more to learn.

I'm not sure where you are in your career now, but I recommend that you give React another chance, and avoid jumping on the bandwagon to hate on React. It's solved so many problems for me and allowed me to actually enjoy my job as a software developer.

You don't need to write a bunch of JS, that's why JavaScript frameworks like React exist to make this easy. JavaScript is the only client-side scripting language on the browser that you can use to manipulate the DOM. If you want to locally CRUD without making a round trip to the server- you have two options- manual DOM manipulation, or use a JavaScript framework. That idea that HTML streaming will replace JS frameworks and REST APIs, and is easier and less problematic than a JS framework, is preposterous to me.

JavaScript is the only language browsers will run. It's not gatekeeping to suggest that you have to learn and use JavaScript frameworks if you want to build web applications- it's a fact.

There is no "pain" managing large React / Redux applications for experienced frontend software engineers. If you don't want to write JavaScript, you probably shouldn't be building interactive applications for the web.

The Browser manages HTML, CSS and JavaScript and provides Developer Tools to debug and manage these languages. When you build with a javascript framework, you package a user experience that is entirely run by the browser, only to dispatch and save to the server when necessary.

I doubt there is a future for "backend SPA" frameworks- no one will take seriously the idea of, instead of two REST calls to get and put data, every client must connect through a socket to manage user input. Surely that will dramatically increase server bandwidth, and ignite the same type of "bloat" arguments that SPA critics use.

I come from a financial reporting background where pages needed to be dynamic and update through filters / sorting / etc- think Excel or Robinhood- these are applications, not pages. When you are building an application, users don't want to experience a page refresh. You either want a dynamic behavior without page refresh, or not. React Router gives you client-side routing- I don't know why you wouldn't want that even if you were building something like AirBnB where there is mostly static content- to argue against dynamic search and filtering without page refresh seems silly to me.

I can't relate to this at all. I've been happily working on SPAs with React and Redux for nearly 6 years.

Hotwire makes no sense: switching to managing client-side state on the server and sending HTML over the wire introduces a ton of problems: you are going to have to write and debug JavaScript eventually. Now your server is running client-side code to update every local browser state? How is that scalable at all?

React has a ton of great libraries for UI that these articles always ignore: Something like react-select to manage a dynamic dropdown- you can't implement that on the server.

You need SPAs for complex dashboards, and React is a great library to store and update local state. I don't understand what the controversy is.

This is like saying "most products don't work". It's totally subjective. Blatant lies usually aren't tolerated in ad networks. I'm talking about "it's the hottest summer on record, therefore you may consider a pool" not "you will lose 10 pounds" which is strictly not allowed.

Most instagram ads are more entertaining and insightful than this article. Advertising is actually about educating the consumer for many products, and I think we're moving more toward personal ads that don't feel like ads. Sometimes you come across an ad that helps you or even changes your life. Things like new games, books or ideas. This article has nothing to do with the end of social media.

Tim recently addressed this exact argument with "my books are not for everyone". He's not saying everyone on Earth should have a 4 hour work week.

This is as ridiculous as saying "Stop watching videos". Everyone's online courses and video content is completely different and unique to their level of experience. Most online courses hold your hand through building a project: that's a good thing, for those who want that content.

Well the footage of his death was "accidentally" erased.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51053205

Right, because there is nothing suspicious at all about how the camera footage mysteriously disappeared on the night he died.