Ask HN: What is the draw of React?

4 points

7 years ago

I've been building database-driven web applications since the days of classic ASP and was an early Rails adopter. While I believe in using the right tool for the job, I've always seen myself as someone open to radical change. That's why I am so uncomfortable admitting that after several years of trying to understand why people voluntarily use React, I still don't get it.

I've concluded that either I'm officially in my dinosaur years or the current generation of web developers are experiencing a collective hallucination.

Sam Stephenson made a really good point in this excellent video introducing Turbolinks 5:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA&t=3m22s

Unless you're Facebook or Google, you likely don't have the same problems they do. Just because Facebook needs to reimagine the Button doesn't mean that you should do that on your MVP. Lest you accuse me of being hyperbolic, there are over a million instances of "button.jsx" on GitHub:

https://github.com/search?q=button.jsx&type=Code

Googling for answers to explain why people use React:

- you can build "reusable" components

- the virtual DOM is easier to work with and faster to update

- you can finally blend all of your HTML, CSS and view logic into one file using a weird JS/HTML hybrid that has all sorts of quirks

- you no longer have to write CSS... write it as a JS object, it'll be awesome

- easy to learn in just a few hours

I don't have any of these problems, and no project I've ever worked on would have benefitted from someone announcing that instead of getting a proof of concept working they would first focus on reimplementing the concept of form elements. As for it being easy to learn... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I genuinely want to be convinced or at least understand why this library is so popular. Give me your best examples of how React made something easier, better, faster. What justified the pain of throwing out 20+ years of accumulated best practices?

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