I think reactjs is an actual cult. Not like one, not similar to one, but a real actual cult.

They have magical thinking, deny reality, blindly follow whatever new things there is, rationalize insane things, require immense time commitments, have an elitist attitude, it's an actual real life cult.

much like any other frontend framework, but your reasoning?

They have stickers too. Draw you in and then no way out. You’re maintaining JSX for the next five years. You’ve been warned, kids.

@AleCx04 The claim is things are faster with it. We all know the development time is somewhere between 20-100 times longer.

They say the code is more maintainable but we all know that they'll totally change their minds in 6 months how to do things.

They claim it simplifies things but it's more code, more logic, more functions, more files, more abstractions, there's literally nothing simpler at all.

All the claims are profoundly staggeringly false. Absurdly incorrect. Yet the adherents become more dedicated and double down on the claims nonetheless.

The human institution that most closely resembles are cults.

I've long thought frameworks feel needlessly ceremonial and ornate and the videos I've watched from the conferences a little too exuberant and unhinged.

Some even claim they're perfect and blame the user on the front page saying essentially "if it's broken that's you, not us" - a "don't question the leader" mentality.

"This is for elitists. If you fail, it's on you."

Do cults change their minds on how to do things? Isn’t that what science does? I thought cults were dogmatic in their static beliefs.

@platypus they absolutely do. it's called "thought reform". Look at the bullet-points here, most frameworks check all of them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Front-end is shit job, React makes it less shit

I’m out of my area of expertise here, but isn’t thought reform indoctrinating new members into the ideas of the cult—not the cult shifting their own position?

@platypus cults shift their own positions all the time. The doomsday cults make dozens of apocalypse predictions and then regroup. Look here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

One of the signs of a cult is a profound *inconsistency*. The fog and confusion is intentional.

Also programmers fit the common profile for cult victims as characteristically lonely and socially isolated people.

@platypus Here's another example. This is from the Heaven's Gate Cult.

It's a promise of enlightenment, a silver bullet that will make you the diamond in the rough. If only you join, you will truly ascend into the elite special secret world. This is Nirvana. Everyone is happy here.

Come, use framework X, join us!

@theabbie I beg to differ. React makes it more shit.

@100110111 The output is shittier, but with much less efforts, definitely less shittier than any other framework.

@100110111 if what I'm saying is true then what these people really need is emotional support and social connection, not combativeness.

Attacks set them up for retrenchment and push them deeper in.

^^ Like what just happened there and VV down there.

I disagree. I have been using multiple js frameworks since i started with js around Netscape 2 and while react most definitely is not perfect its one of the best I have worked with lately.

And I for a couple of years around 2000 maintained my own internal framework but ditched that in favor of jquery.

And we did a thorough evaluation of react vs angular when we choose react.

I have lately tested vue which share quite a lot of overall thoughts but with less own syntax and using mor plain js syntax.

In my opinion its more a matter of how you approach management of state and changes and I personally prefer reacts philosophy.

Regarding more or less code, that depends, I find that it creates less code once you understand how they have selected to do things. But if you are avoiding the intended way it will result in much more code yes.

React is functional and functional often can result in smaller less complex code but only if you really program in a functional style.

And I agree that with any framework you will have zealots that will defend it mindlessly.

But as a framework I still think its one of the better, at least as I go about designing things, and the new hooks state management, while a bit of a mind bender to really get to understand to get full efficiency, it also keeps state management along the code it manages.

But for big applications with much shared state or lots of logic that is intermingled I would probably break that out using mobx or similar pure state manager.

@theabbie if that were the case, the best way to do frontend would be with no framework at all... oh wait, it is.

But if one has to use framework, I have yet to meet a dev irl that didn’t prefer Vue over React. Point being, React isn’t even the least of evils when it comes to frontend frameworks.

@100110111 It is very easy to get stuff done in React, reuse components, copy stuff from web, and only way to write maintainable UI, It's normal to prefer it, No-framework era is long gone.

@theabbie I'm here if you need someone to talk to. really. I don't know if there's a dm feature here. but reach out any time.

@kristopolous Do I look depressed?

@theabbie my email is my name on here followed by gmail.com. I'll keep everything completely private if you choose to reach out. Hope your day is well.

@kristopolous Finally someone who can help me fight my autism

@kristopolous there's no direct messages. It's a message board platform.

The anti-React community is just as much if not more of a cult than the React community

@black-kite there's something called projection. Please look into it. May be important for you. Have a good day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

@kristopolous I knew you’d probably turn that argument against me, except that it doesn’t apply because I’m not a React advocate. It’s one of the tools that I use among others and I don’t have a pronounced preference for it. I therefore consider myself to be rather neutral and from what I’m seeing, you’re the one being more "cultish" about the whole issue, throwing your holy book (Wikipedia) references at me.

@black-kite my apologies then. If you qualify your claim like I did with something substantive it'll be much easier to take such a claim seriously.

@black-kite one more thing, if wikipedia isn't your thing maybe you can look at a good reference for narcissism over here: http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/...

Programming projects are part of human culture and exist as social institutions like anything else. They don't sit outside the entrapments.

Everyone thinks their particular passion *does* exist outside the entrapments btw, so claiming that programming or X is different and *actually* does is the exact expected pattern of denial.

It doesn't. Frameworks and libraries are human institutions built by humans run by humans and comprised of them. It's a social creation of what Fred Brooks called "pure thought stuff" .

The 1950 computer book by Norbert Weiner, "The Human Use of Human Beings" is a pretty good discussion on this dynamic. I recommend it if you want to learn more.

Blazor *server side) > ANy JS framework.

Working with it right now. Shit is fast and easy to deveop.

@NoToJavaScript Bolero > Blazor - but tbh, I still prefer good ol’ plain vanilla PHP for everything that goes to prod and isn’t for internal use...

@100110111 I googled it. it's F# and webassembly only (Which has too much draw backs. I don't use webassembly with Blazor, but server side rendering).

Seems interesting, but I don't know F# and don't really want to learn new language :) but will do a test for a simple app for fun

@theabbie I’ve been using hyperscript even in jQuery times. Nothing actually changed. Just the syntax.

@petergriffin React is different, and is nothing like jQuery or HyperScript, It takes minutes to build components that usually takes hours.

@theabbie it has literally the same concepts as hyperscript behind it’s JSX syntax, the only difference is, That React fucked up the API which was already good years before.

In fact, if you Setup your tsconfig correctly, you can write JSX which is directly compatible with hyperscript instead of React.createElement‘s API.

@petergriffin React is not just JSX, all the state management and stuff makes stuff really easy, It is good if used properly.

The advantage of react is declarative nonstatic document layout. HTML is declarative enough but it is completely static, and the Javascript DOM API is imperative. Give me a thinner declarative input/dom library and we can talk.

Honestly I love react except for their way to handle css which is kinda meh but whatever. tried vuejs and did not like it as much.

@theabbie I ask you to sincerely think about the "react takes minutes". Next time please time yourself. All the debugging, documentation reading, managing of dependencies, testing, and coding. All of it. You'll be really surprised by the results.

Do this exercise, take it seriously, really. A bit of honesty will go a long way.

You know how to contact me if you need to reach out.

@kristopolous I learned react very recently so I'm not committed, but I still find it much faster. It doesn't take minutes in real life but if you are able to separate react (ui) from the data access logic it can be much, much faster than imperatively shuffling DOM nodes.

@homo-lorens I've had to use it off and on for about 7 years. Released products with it, sold companies with software using it, ran teams where we did it, personally coded it myself.

I've ran lots of measurable studies. Maintenance man-hours, time from first-release to stability (where I can take someone off fulltime from the product) QA hours and team size necessary etc.

modern html, css, javascript with a bit of server-side php or python performed, depending on the metric, around 20-100 times better.

In project planning projections, I was generally allocating 4-7 developers on a react project and used months as the metric whereby in the non-framework solutions it would be 1-2 devs and the metric would be days.

Given the recent focus on cults I started looking at it with new eyes about a year ago. Everything unfortunately makes sense.

There's nothing to "win" here. You can't convince people to turn away with facts. They're in it for emotional and social reasons.

@homo-lorens btw some things didn't exhibit this tendency.

Here's some signs. If the tools

remove or make impossible core features of a language such as debugging and syntax

require extra steps (essentially 'permission') to do core things

uses non-specific language and don't describe concrete relationships

frequently pivot to new methodologies

is all-encompassing and can't be removed

If the programmers
obsesses over code purity and are unwilling to entertain working solutions

worry more about pleasing the tool then solving the problem

believe colleagues who dissent about or don't use the technology are lesser then themselves

insist that simple things are truly complicated in the real world, but only the technology makes it so

think inability to produce is due to their own inadequacies as opposed to deficiencies of the tool

want to change project organization around the tool

are emotionally hostile to other technologies in the field

refuse to work with other technologies

@kristopolous React is meant for SPAs. The more you change the DOM the more you win compared to a "traditional" webpage. It's a different approach that makes the mundane more circumstantial in exchange for making the difficult easier. It pays off when your manager or client comes up with ideas like infinite scrolling, input fields keeping their value across pages, popups upon popups, etc. Not when you just have to make a form, compute things when it's submitted and show them to the user on a separate view page.
At least these are the things that I've tried and found amusingly simple with it.

@homo-lorens right, low tolerance for uncertainty, naive idealism, disillusionment with the status quo. You probably followed a guide that did the gestalt therapy of hot-seating.

You may even feel guilt or shame for not using it and see accomplishing things with it as almost a "prize" you have to "achieve".

It's pretty standard indoctrination techniques, sorry to tell you.

@kristopolous I have none of those feelings and you're fighting a straw man.

@homo-lorens I'm not your enemy. I really hope you have a great afternoon.

@kristopolous I am not disillusioned, I never had an illusion. React lets you change the DOM easily, in vanilla JS that's a pain in the ass. React makes it easy to keep state away from UI, that's useless if you have little to no client-side state beyond form values and the currently open page. It's a matter of whether you want to do the things React helps you do.

@kristopolous I do. You have misjudged my mental state and I'm not exactly happy about that, which probably shows in my replies. In any case, we're on the internet and don't know each other so it's perfectly normal.

@kristopolous I hope you have a nice afternoon too.

@homo-lorens on the other hand, SPAs are over engineered garbage most of the times. Simple pages are better in 99% of cases.

@iiii Depends on the feature set but yeah. I'm very glad DevRant isn't a spa.

@iiii Depends, for pure information pages I do agree that more plain html and more static info is often better.

But for SPA’s that are more like an application, like a cms editor or the administration part of an online shop you usually have very much functionality crammed into a single page with information being updated or replaced, views changed back and forth in a way that would take time if your loading pages.

Thats the area I have been using react a lot and it has helped a lot.

I have been able to create thing that I previously have tried to do but always ended up either failing to get to work smoothly or work but clunky.

With react its was a breeze.

So the time do do it with react was mot only shorter but the result much better.

And I have been doing the same things using plain js then jquery for over a dozen years before learning react so I definitely have a reference ;)

And react won big time.

@kristopolous what you said makes absolute sense to me.

@homo-lorens redux kicks so much ass when it comes to keeping ui and logic apart, but damn reducers look ugly. Ugliest structures I’ve seen lol (just a personal thing)

@kristopolous I know it's hard for people to understand React, I understand your pain, But, If you spend some time learning, you will be able to make Efficient React Apps one day, good luck.

@Voxera interesting... I have comparable experiences and have found your good ol’ standard vanilla PHP + jQuery the superior method to React. Or rather, it wasn’t necessarily that much harder or more time consuming using React, but the traditionalist approach always aced when it came to performane benchmarks and was less prone for edge case bugginess. This may be due to team being more proficient in those tools, but for sure we have yet to find a justifiable use case for React.

@theabbie React is super easy to learn, you realise that?

@100110111 My definition of learning is that you don't hate to use it, as long as you hate it, you haven't learnt it.

@theabbie eh? Your definitions are definitely weird. I on the other hand think that in order to be justified to dislike a tool you have to learn it first. E.g., the only thing I can say about Go or Ruby is that their syntax burns my eyes, hence won’t learn withouth compelling reasons to do so. Can’t justifiably hate on them, though, since I know so little.

React, on the other hand, I’ve learned and used. It is a piece of crap tbh, as these frameworks tend to be. Vue is a piece of crap, too, but where React should shine, it shines brighter, so our teams use Vue where such an approach can be justified over the more preferred methods.

Also, to clarify: I don’t hate React. I find it just really meh.

@100110111 To be precise, you hate (dislike) front-end, what exactly is easier way to build front-end? PHP is not the answer, these front-end frameworks are necessary, Vanilla JS is not feasible, can't be worked on by a team, Separating Front-end and Back-end is a great idea. Maybe use Typescript with React if it makes things easier for you.

@100110111 just like with people: you hate someone either because you don't know them or know them too much.

@theabbie my answer is the standard vanilla PHP with a little JS sprinkled over it where needed. It’s not strictly front-end only tho. The justifications for separating front and back or keeping them together are project specific (separation is no holy grail in real world applications, as are not microservices or serverless etc - sometimes simplicity takes the prize), but when separation is done, I usually work with the backend.

But my preferred frontend for production if I had to choose front only? Angular - or maybe Vue (yes, with TypeScript), depending on the exact scope, requirements etc. I see no use case for React where the approaches I prefer over it wouldn’t suit it better. That is down purely to personal preference, tho. Funny thing tho, it’s not only my personal preference: React is probably the best known tool in our teams, but we all choose not to use it, since none of us likes React.

@100110111 Angular is good, I don't know how React is much different, but, It does mean Frameworks are more efficient, websites are now web apps, they need lot of functionality.

@theabbie my whole career is SaaS products, and the PHP approach is the best approach for our teams there, more often than not.

@100110111 jquery can be fast for many things but as state builds up and more and more of the page is dependent on it managing that state gets more complex.

And while you of cause can do this with jquery, react helps a lot.

Especially when you need to move things around due to new requirements.

And our pages was quite massive, before going to react we already had over 2.5 loc js when using jquery not counting any libraries, only our own page specific code ;).

And when we switch to react we collected multiple old pages in the same new page to avoid having to load a new page from the server.

And even for the user react actually out performed due to the virtual dom that kept tab on what actually needed to change minimizing actual changes to the dom and by that any reflow.

@theabbie thanks for the disparaging elitist reply:

"Cults see themselves as the enlightened, chosen, and elite. They are unwilling to analyze the material or historical realities surrounding their claims."

Please seek some help.

@kristopolous thanks newbie

@theabbie it looks like only 1 of your 102 repositories on github even uses react and the one that does involves 4 people, about 5 weeks of work and it appears to be a CRUD app with a comment feature.

So please, be a bit more honest.

@kristopolous I don't whine about it, You do realise you don't understand React, spend some time learning it than whining.

@theabbie Please look over the claims about time and resource allocation above. I've used react for 7 years and done plenty of cost/benefit analysis on it, was involved in a company with a venture funding round of capital centering on delivering an application built in it.

Running the financial and resource allocation of the cost of react-based applications is something I'm extremely familiar with.

@kristopolous After 7 years, you might have enough experience to convince your company and co-workers that they should try something other than React, which they most probably will not approve, If there is a best tool for job, go for it.

@theabbie that isn't spanning a single company. This is experience over multiple projects and an analysis of the trends, costs, overruns and deliverables and looking for patterns to avoid disasters from repeating.

The most noticeable indicator was certain libraries and tools which seemed to always be there for the problem projects and mostly absent for the successful ones.

I was stumped what they had in common for years until I happened to start reading about cults.

@kristopolous I would suggest you to let developers do their job, they know what they are doing, Your don't always get to work your way.

@kristopolous complex solutions are often less usable and desirable than simpler ones. No wonder that overloaded frameworks yield some resistance.

@kristopolous there’s no use arguing with Abishek here. Might as well be talking to a wall...

@100110111 it's like talking to an antivaxxer. The person is totally pilled.

Kids these days

Pretty much like any other frontend crap then