Until today, I haven’t worked on a react app or front end project in about 5 months.

Hoooo boy. What a fucking rollercoaster ride. One minute you’re doing some slick shit you learned how to do from working on backend projects, the next you’re screaming at your linter and pissing on your keyboard.

2/5 stars do not recommend.

I’m out.

*ascends into the cloud*

I can make you feel better about yourself - I dedicated the best 10 years of my life to AS3...yes, you read that right. ActionScript.

React is amazing and wonderful and slick and stylish and absolutely sprawling crap that makes very little sense when you dig into it, and causes tons of lag because it’s an over-abstracted mess loaded with unnecessary everything that’s impossible to prune because that’s just how it was designed.

It’s a shiny, gleaming, absolutely beautiful phone that’s the size of a suitcase, weighs fifty eight kilos, and lags worse than Internet Explorer on the NBN once you start actually using it for something.

@ojt-rant but ActionScript 3 was the version before ECMAScript-inspired Syntax? The one with the small editor fields and buttons in Macromedia Flash? The one with the VisualBasic-like syntax? I forgot about all of this, but now I remember 🙈

@fraktalisman AS1 was during its Macromedia days ("future splash" originally). AS2 was better, but AS3 (based on ECMA script) was a huge improvement and came about in the Flash golden era 2003-2009. Ignoring the security flaws and Adobe's piss-poor management (and money grabbing) it was actually really decent. I made some great games for some big clients.
And then Steve Jobs told the world Flash was dead...and with it so was the bulk of my career.

React is fantastic

However, people forget that React is just a library for building UI components - you then have to bolt on 100 dependencies to do everything else

And of course every React project chooses a different 100 dependencies to use, which means you're basically starting from scratch every time you look at a new project

Say what you will about Angular/Ember/etc, but at least they have standardised ways of doing common things like routing

@Root I haven’t tried it, but Preact seems like a good alternative. It has the same API as React and is even compatible with existing React libraries but is faster and lighter. https://preactjs.com

Personally, I would choose Svelte for my next front-end project.

Angular is like learning to ride a bike, you can always hop back on. React is like learning eat an ice cream from the cone end up. If you can do it well you come out looking like a god but most of the time you’re gonna end up with a sticky face.

@LiterallyJesus I agree with this, haven’t done Angular for about 3 or 4 years (it was Angular 2 back then) but recently got myself a nice piece work work as a one man team writing a new web app. Just finished it in Angular 12 and everything I had learnt years ago still applied with a few nice new features to help along the way.

Next company I’m joining use React but I don’t know why anyone would bother with it when it takes so much time to get all the foundation work in place and relies on so much plumbing code.