Question in my mind since I woke up.. What's so special about React. :/

It makes front end development so much better since it allows you to describe what you want rendered and not worry how it will be done. Also it lets you reuse components so you can build on top of older stuff and don't need to reinvent the wheel every time.

@Artemix It's hipster hype like a car was hispter hype in the eyes of horse riders

I don't know. I see it as a modern day jQuery.

One of the great thing about these frameworks is that you worry about data rather views. Once you create a view and bind it to a data source, it takes care of the rest. It also helps to create modular components that can be self independent and reusable.

@Froot That's fanboi-ism right there. Talk about overstating something!! It's a way of developing the front end of a browser-based system or site. You know that the concept of modular code and reuse has existed since Classic ASP.NET introduced the #include directive? Just because they were rubbish doesn't mean they weren't there!

It is not as disruptive as you're suggesting at all. I swear - to hear some people you'd think we carved websites on stone tablets before React came along.

@Artemix React is slow? React is not slow at all for what it does. If you want to go write your own DOM diffing algorithms and whatnot then go right ahead. I prefer to spend time on getting stuff done rather than reinventing the wheel. Also, if you find React to be slow then use Inferno instead. It's very similar to react but much faster. We use it to build a webapps that runs on a single core 1ghz CPU with 512mb memory and haven't noticed a slowdown compared to native.

@CrankyOldDev Cool, you are cranky aren't you?

I just started out with react and I think Virtual Dom and diffing is pretty cool even though the whole jsx conversion is a drag

@amateur64 Once you get used to it it becomes really intuitive. You basically just wrote HTML like you want to see it in the DOM and Babel sorts out the rest for you

@Artemix I have yes. Why?

@Artemix Companies want React. I'm not going to spend my time on learning something the job market doesnt want. When they become the dominant option, sure.

As for speed, I haven't benchmarked them so I don't know. Would be interesting to benchmark them with Inferno to see how Inferno stacks up tho

@Artemix I'm not interested in most companies anyway. When I look at the market I look at the top 10% tech companies and learn what they want. A mom and pop shop is of no interest to me.

I wonder how elm performs against react. I've heard it's nicer to manage state in elm. State management seems tough in any solution so far so it's addressing a key pain factor here.

From what I understand it also makes development more productive.

Any experiences?

@Froot It'd be a silly name if I wasn't!! 😜Still stand by my point, though.

And you're talking about the jobs market and who wants what. I hope you realise it'll be very different in 12/18/24 months just as it was very different 12/18/24 months ago. That's a very dangerous yardstick to use to decide what's important to know.

I look to companies who want good programmers, not framework experts. Good programmers should be adaptable to cope with the very flexible ecosystems we have these days.

@CrankyOldDev Absolutely. It will keep changing at a very fast pace and that makes it even more important to know what to learn.
As for companies I look for companies:
a) where working environment is good
b) whose product makes an impact and is good
c) whose benefits (incl. salary) are good
d) where I can develop myself

@vertti Afaik @Letmecode uses Elm 😉

@Artemix What alternatives should we be looking at?

@Artemix yes, they are faster, but you forget, they all came after react and they all learnt from what react has done, and at the end of the day we talking faster in non-human-discernable speeds, we talking milliseconds.

Personally I like Vue, it's great, but there is also a much larger community behind react, and with 16 coming out, it is likely to close or even switch h that speed gap that you are so oddly anal about.

I know of fortune 500 companies using it, it is a valuable tool, that does mean the rest are useless, they all have their strengths and weaknesses and it is up to the developer to know these and choose the best one for the job, a few milliseconds faster dom rendering is NOT everything.

WordPress picked backbone, Atlasian chose react, Gitlab is using vue.

Myself living in South Africa, the big boys are react, jQuery + Wordpress and AngularJS, nobody paying money gives a flying fuck about Vue.

Its also not always the tool, a good developer will do a much better job with React than a bad developer would with Vue, just because at its core, in benchmarks it's faster, does not mean the guy using it is not able to completely fuck it up.

@Letmecode alright got it.

I actually generally feel that modern computers are already fast enough to handle any framework out there. That's why I'm far more interested in development productivity rather than some synthetic benchmarks. Benchmarks might mean a lot more for some backend development but not nearly as much for front-end.

I've heard good things about Elm, gonna try it next. Should be nice leveraging a functional language at the front-end side now that I've been messing with Elixir for backend.

@vertti it can depend on your background, react alone is easy enough to learn, vue is quite likely easier and if u used AngularJS then it's dead easy. Reacts biggest learning curve comes in the nuances with Redux, I found learning Vuex easier, but that was also after having used Redux for 6 months, you are always influenced by past experiences.

As an experienced dev moving into a react Redux project took me about 2 or 3 months before I felt 100% confident in how I was explaining things to juniors.

Vue was a few hours before I had picked it up, but that's when I was tech playing so in the same year it was AngularJS, Angular 2, React, React Native, Aurelia and then Vue. It's more likely that anything is easy to learn around that point, of the lot Vue by far, as in very, has the best docs.

@Artemix React isn't slow, but most people won't use the API correctly. React allows you to specify if a component should render or not according to your custom logic, but people use it without even reading the docs, following basic tutorials.

I'll just drop this here again.
Check out Inferno. If every ms matters then Inferno is a good pick. If not, I'd go with react because it has a larger community and more support behind it

@RTRMS Vue is probably the only framework that I could learn just by reading their docs. But then I knew React already so that made a lot of things easier for me.

@Artemix ouch the burn