Thread by @jevakallio

What time is it? RANT TIME.

You know what really pisses me off? Goddamn REACT, that's what. I've been working with React for the last few years, and it's the most BORING piece of technology EVER and it's ruining the fun of being a UI developer.

A thread. 👇

To start with, it’s just JavaScript. How are we supposed to impress our friends in the industry and feel superior to them, when we are just writing JavaScript?

How are people supposed to see how smart we are when we’re writing the one language out there that everybody knows?

And not only is React JavaScript, but it’s just plain old JavaScript. There’s no fancy reactive template language that we could memorise for job security. There are no fancy AOT compilers that we could use to optimise it. BOOOOORING!

Oh and sure, there’s JSX, so I guess that’s a bit special, because DSLs are SO HOT right now.

But MOTHERFUCKER, it’s not like it’s a fancy cutting edge language extension, it’s a DSL of HTML, pretty much the only thing that is more boring and mundane than JavaScript.

The one tool I reach out to when I want to make my life exciting is RxJS. Nothing makes you feel like you’re living your best life more than reading a bunch of code and having no idea what it does. At least it's a challenge.

But no, React is all just GODDAMN functions

So you think, oooh, functional programming! That’s cool. We can definitely stretch our mental muscle there!

But no, there’s not a monad in sight. It’s just run-of-the-mill pragmatic, functional-lite programming that any moron can grok without an advanced maths background

And don’t even get me started on state management and the whole unidirectional data flow bullshit. It’s just so predictable. You write simple-ass pieces of code that do simple things and there are really no problems left to solve.

Library does everything for you, solves all the hard problems. You can’t even get your kicks writing clever optimisations anymore, now they're ruining the fun of that too by implementing time slicing and async rendering right into the library so that things will just fucking work

And the fuckers barely changed the API! What’s the point of a big rewrite if you don’t even get the joy of getting to learn a whole bunch of new things and get the pleasure of figuring out entirely new architecture and rewriting your boring old legacy code from scratch?

Couple of deprecated lifecycle methods, replaced with a couple new ones. I mean GOD DAMN.

And let’s talk about the API, huh? You’d figure that if there was this great library that's so amazing, at least you could get your rocks off by becoming the ultimate specialist in the arcane knowledge of React. But hell no, the API is so small. It’s just FUCKING COMPONENTS.

And how infuriating is it that everything is a goddamn component? Your UI elements are components. With Apollo and soon with Suspense, your data fetching will be just a component. If you’re using styled-components, your styles are just components. I'm so SICK of components

And every component is just a small piece of code a smart child could understand. You can’t even get all Linnaean and build these fun domain taxonomies because it’s all just functions that take data in and poop components out.

So I thought I'd give up web dev and go do mobile development, but now the assholes have written React Native and, here we are, back on this same predictable, boring crap. Thanks A LOT, React.

What am I have to going to do next? Go find some actual real-world problems to solve and products to build?

No thanks. I'll just go drink in the bikeshed instead.