Link tags: react

AI is Stifling Tech Adoption | Vale.Rocks

Want to use all those great features that have been in landing in browsers over the past year or two? View transitions! Scroll-driven animations! So much more!

Well, your coding co-pilot is not going to going to be of any help.

Large language models, especially those on the scale of many of the most accessible, popular hosted options, take humongous datasets and long periods to train. By the time everything has been scraped and a dataset has been built, the set is on some level already obsolete. Then, before a model can reach the hands of consumers, time must be taken to train and evaluate it, and then even more to finally deploy it.

Once it has finally released, it usually remains stagnant in terms of having its knowledge updated. This creates an AI knowledge gap. A period between the present and AI’s training cutoff. This gap creates a time between when a new technology emerges and when AI systems can effectively support user needs regarding its adoption, meaning that models will not be able to service users requesting assistance with new technologies, thus disincentivising their use.

So we get this instead:

I’ve anecdotally noticed that many AI tools have a ‘preference’ for React and Tailwind when asked to tackle a web-based task, or even to create any app involving an interface at all.

JSX.lol - Does anybody actually like React?

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If Not React, Then What? - Infrequently Noted

Put the kettle on; it’s another epic data-driven screed from Alex. The footnotes on this would be a regular post on any other blog (and yes, even the footnotes have footnotes).

This is a spot-on description of the difference between back-end development and front-end development:

Code that runs on the server can be fully costed. Performance and availability of server-side systems are under the control of the provisioning organisation, and latency can be actively managed by developers and DevOps engineers.

Code that runs on the client, by contrast, is running on The Devil’s Computer. Nothing about the experienced latency, client resources, or even available APIs are under the developer’s control.

Client-side web development is perhaps best conceived of as influence-oriented programming. Once code has left the datacenter, all a web developer can do is send thoughts and prayers.

As a result, an unreasonably effective strategy is to send less code. In practice, this means favouring HTML and CSS over JavaScript, as they degrade gracefully and feature higher compression ratios. Declarative forms generate more functional UI per byte sent. These improvements in resilience and reductions in costs are beneficial in compounding ways over a site’s lifetime.

I don’t have time to learn React - Keith Cirkel

React is a non-transferable skill.

React proponents might claim that React will teach you modern UI, but from what I’ve seen it barely copes with modern UI. autofocus is broken, custom elements don’t work in all but the experimental version, using any “modern” features like dialog or popovers requires useEffect, and the synthetic event system teaches you so little about how DOM actually works. This isn’t modern UI, it’s UI from 2013 at its inception. I don’t have the time left in my career to pick up UI paradigms that haven’t evolved much beyond from when Barack Obama was in office.

When I mentor early career developers and they ask me what they should learn, I can’t say React, they don’t have time. I mean sure, pick up enough React to land you the inevitable job doing it, but it’s not going to level up your career.

How Microsoft Edge Is Replacing React With Web Components - The New Stack

“And so what we did is we started looking at, internally, all of the places where we’re using web technology — so all of our internal web UIs — and realized that they were just really unacceptably slow.”

Why were they slow? The answer: React.

“We realized that our performance, especially on low-end machines, was really terrible — and that was because we had adopted this React framework, and we had used React in probably one of the worst ways possible.”

Liskov’s Gun: The parallel evolution of React and Web Components – Baldur Bjarnason

React has become a bloated carcass of false promises, misleading claims, and unending layers of backwards compatibility – the wrong kind of backwards compatibility, as they still occasionally break your fucking code when updating.

Pretty much anything else is a better tool for pretty much any web development task.

The Neverending Story

Since the early days of the web, large corporations have seemingly always wanted more than the web platform or web standards could offer at any given moment. Whether they were aiming for cross-platform-compatibility, more advanced capabilities, or just to be the one runtime/framework/language to rule them all, there’s always been a company that believes they can “fix” it or “own” it.

Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React.

What Is React.js? (Webbed Briefs)

Its proponents can be weird, it takes itself far too seriously, and its documentation is interminable. These are some ways that some people have described Christianity. This video is about React.js.

Reckoning: Part 1 — The Landscape - Infrequently Noted

I want to be a part of a frontend culture that accepts and promotes our responsibilities to others, rather than wallowing in self-centred “DX” puffery. In the hierarchy of priorities, users must come first.

Alex doesn’t pull his punches in this four-part truth-telling:

1. The Landscape
2. Object Lesson
3. Caprock
4. The Way Out

The React anti-pattern of hugely bloated single-page apps has to stop. And we can stop it.

Success or failure is in your hands, literally. Others in the equation may have authority, but you have power.

Begin to use that power to make noise. Refuse to go along with plans to build YAJSD (Yet Another JavaScript Disaster). Engineering leaders look to their senior engineers for trusted guidance about what technologies to adopt. When someone inevitably proposes the React rewrite, do not be silent. Do not let the bullshit arguments and nonsense justifications pass unchallenged. Make it clear to engineering leadership that this stuff is expensive and is absolutely not “standard”.

New Web Development. Or, why Copilots and chatbots are particularly bad for modern web dev – Baldur Bjarnason

The paradigm shift that web development is entering hinges on the fact that while React was a key enabler of the Single-Page-App and Component era of the web, in practice it normally tends to result in extremely poor products. Built-in browser APIs are now much more capable than they were when React was first invented.

Pivoting From React to Native DOM APIs: A Real World Example - The New Stack

One dev team made the shift from React’s “overwhelming VDOM” to modern DOM APIs. They immediately saw speed and interaction improvements.

Yay! But:

…finding developers who know vanilla JavaScript and not just the frameworks was an “unexpected difficulty.”

Boo!

Also, if you have a similar story to tell about going cold turkey on React, you should share it with Richard:

If you or your company has also transitioned away from React and into a more web-native, HTML-first approach, please tag me on Mastodon or Threads. We’d love to share further case studies of these modern, dare I say post-React, approaches.

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity – Baldur Bjarnason

An insightful and incisive appraisal of technology adoption. This truth hits hard:

React and the component model standardises the software developer and reduces their individual bargaining power excluding them from a proportional share in the gains. Its popularity among executives and management is entirely down to the fact that it helps them erase the various specialities – CSS, accessibility, standard JavaScript in the browser, to name a few – from the job market. Those specialities might still exist in practice – as ad hoc and informal requirements during teamwork – but, as far as employment is concerned, they’re such a small part of the overall developer job market that they might as well be extinct.

Front-end development’s identity crisis - Elly Loel

I know how to do full-stack development, not because I wanted to but because I had to.

Grim, but true. I know quite a few extremely talented front-end developers who have been forced out of the field because of what’s described here.

There is no choice anymore, I can’t escape it. React is so pervasive that almost every job is using it. On the rare occasion that they’re not using it, they’re using something like it.

Churn

This is a good description of the appeal of HTML web components:

WC lifecycles are crazy simple: you register the component with customElements.define and it’s off to the races. Just write a class and the browser will take care of elements appearing and disappearing for you, regardless of whether they came from a full reload, a fetch request, or—god forbid—a document.write. The syntax looks great in markup, too: no more having to decorate with js-something classes or data attributes, you just wrap your shit in a custom element called something-controller and everyone can see what you’re up to. Since I’m firmly in camp “progressively enhance or go home” this fits me like a glove, and I also have great hopes for Web Components improving the poor state of pulling in epic dependencies like date pickers or text editors.

Removing React is just weakness leaving your codebase — Begin Blog

The web is backward and forward compatible. Anything you learn about HTML, CSS and browser API’s will serve you well for the next 25 years, which is not something you can say about the current fashion in JavaScript libraries. By ejecting from the thrash of React and other heavy-handed frameworks and doubling down on web fundamentals, you’ll be future-proofing both your career and your codebases.

Concatenating text

Why the heck is everyone reaching for React as soon as something on the screen needs to update? And why do we insist on squishing our frontend concerns together with our backend concerns?

I’m glad I’m not the only one constantly asking myself those questions.

Look: is the idea of physically separating “code that runs business logic and builds markup” from “code that handles realtime interactions” really that awful? You can write both in JS if you like, I promise I won’t judge, but we can’t keep pretending that they’re basically the same.

Kind of annoyed at React

React was never able to stand on its own merits as a framework (as its merits are few). Now the cracks are really starting to show.

Cameron Dutro on ruby.social

Here’s the inside scoop on why Github is making a bizarre move from working web components to a legacy React stack.

Most of what I heard in favor of React was a) it’s got a good DX, b) it’s easy to hire for, and c) we only want to use it for a couple of features, not the entire website.

It’s all depressingly familiar, but it’s very weird to come across this kind of outdated thinking in 2023.

My personal prediction is that, eventually, the company (and many other companies) will realize how bad React is for most things, and abandon it. I guess we’ll see.

HTML Web Components: An Example - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Here’s an excellent case study of an HTML web component. Jim starts by showing how you’d create the component in React; then he shows how you’d do it as a JavaScript web component; finally he shows the way to do it as an HTML web component:

The point is we’re starting with a baseline, core experience that will provide basic functionality and content to a wide array of user agents before any JavaScript is required.

Once you’ve done everything you can in vanilla HTML to provide core elements of your baseline experience, you can begin enhancing the existing markup with additional functionality.

This is where HTML web components shine.

Web developers: remarkably untalented and careless? – Baldur Bjarnason

I’d like to suggest that everybody in web dev point their dysfunctional novelty seeking (of which I suffer as well) in the direction of HTML and CSS. See how much can be done without JavaScript. It’s a lot! Then look at writing more lightweight JavaScript that’s layered on top of the HTML as enhancements. Because it’s an enhancement and not required for functionality, you can cut the line higher and use newer tech without worry.

See how refreshing that feels.