> Gotta admit, I'm still not completely grasping the hype around HTMX
Right place, right time.
React, the darling of web dev, has become huge and unwieldy and complex. The newcomers haven't been able to unseat it due to sheer ecosystem advantage. And then comes HTMX with quirky marketing hitting all the right notes (and having some actual good ideas underneath all that).
Huge as in the library ecosystem? - yes it is huge.
Huge as in its a massive dependency? - yes it is huge.
I couldn't understand why React was so popular till I read a comment where someone explained that Tailwind and React in a large company allows the 1000s of devs to work in tiny little components without conflicting with others, and all of a sudden it makes sense why people make themselves suffer using React. Then everyone else is just following the large companies because "well X/Y/Z use it so we should too!!!"
So, while yes the very latest version of react is *finally* as slim as competitors like preact, don't act like all the legacy projects where a migration is off the table due to time or money just don't exist.
Your level of understanding is not very huge. React is an absolute pleasure to use, and we do enjoy it - that is why it became the most popular library and a revolution in web dev.
Why do you speak for someone else? Those "We" are in the same room with us?
The commenter above first couldn't understand, then read some comment, then understood something completely out-of-point throwing a bunch of generalisms touching me like "people make themselves suffer" and "everyone else is just following" and decided to dump it here? I can't just leave it untouched since I have actual experience with React.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
In fact it contradicts guidelines, as they encourage downvoting without explanation in order to not clutter the thread. They were trying to explain to you, whereas most readers will sinply downvote. Yes, I think they meant that as a kindness.
React is not huge. It’s just a library that converts strings to tags.
Oh you want to use React? You want JSX — the only use case for the React library? You want routing and URLs and history and state management and … ok you don’t want a virtual DOM but you need it. And you need Babel and a build tool and a generator framework (because piecing it all together is too hard) and tree shaking and CSS (in JS!) and lots of weird and complex lifecycle hooks.
React is both bigger (in terms of bytes) and more complex than Angular.
So, to answer your question, React is more complex than just about everything. I’d like to see you find a more complex framework.
Sometimes it feels like those who would develop the next React should really just try to develop the next web browser. Why spend all this time and effort building what is essentially a massive wad of chewing gum and paperclips to take what is essentially a glorified document reader and make it into an application platform?
We can run other executables on our local. The web itself is the problem and what needs to die to give way to something new.
A lot of those “apps” are just dynamic documents and forms that still fits the web model. It’s just that SPA is a bad architecture for them. Why push rendering to the client if all the data comes from the backend or need a round trip through there?
But something like Figma, Slack is indead a huge hack in terms of technology, but it would be way less code and more performance to just have native desktop apps.
The honest answer is because all your users have that wad of chewing gum and paper clips installed on their devices already, and you don't need an IT admin to whitelist your executable to install it in the contexts where that's still necessary.
I worked with large React and large Angular (1 and 2+) codebases. I even migrated projects between them.
I genuinely don't understand how Angular is considered simpler than React.
Both have a build step. React hasn't needed a "generator" for years now (if you mean stuff like CRA). With tools like Vite or RSBuild, it's like 2 lines. Yeah, the JSX needs to be compiled, but so do templates, custom CSS dialect, and TS's old/non-standard decorators in Angular.
Angular has way more quirks and reactivity foot guns than React. I think major React adoption painpoint is hooks, but while they are clunky, they're way "easier to hold" than most Angular tools.
Same when it comes to state management libraries in angular, but I digress.
Right place, right time.
React, the darling of web dev, has become huge and unwieldy and complex. The newcomers haven't been able to unseat it due to sheer ecosystem advantage. And then comes HTMX with quirky marketing hitting all the right notes (and having some actual good ideas underneath all that).