I’ve been learning some React and Flux. You don’t have to develop React apps with ES6, you can still use ES5, but I think having a library that can be used (or has been over the past couple of years) with two different languages with differing syntax and quirks, and is supported via bewildering layers of complexity like transpilers and webpackers and the like, it does nothing to help developers who are just getting started.
The problem is, you start reading articles and tutorials and initially you’ve no idea that ES5 syntax is not the same as ES6, so you start inter-twining concepts from both and finding out that even copying snippets of using React apis using ES5 into ES6 classes does not work (for example). At least in the Angular world they made a clean break when introducing Angular 2 which can be developed using TypeScript and other languages. The two frameworks are obviously and deliberately different.
I don’t think this is entirely React’s fault. It’s more to do with browsers not natively supporting ES6 (yet), and hence the need for transpilation from ES6 source to ES5 for runtime. Just to get Babel and Webpack setup and configured is a significant task. True, you can use a starter project template that’s preconfigured and ready to go, but I like to know how to do things myself so I have the understanding of what I’ve got, rather than working with a black box of magic that I have no idea how to fix if it goes wrong.
There is no denying that the JavaScript world right now is complex and diverse. It’s very complex. It’s also growing and changing quick (just look at the new module trends for JavaScript modules shared via the npm repository – it’s outgrowing every other language by far, in rate of growth and sheer numbers of modules – e.g. take a look at ModuleCounts). There’s so much going on and changing that the phrase ‘JavaScript Fatigue‘ has been coined to describe what it’s like to try and keep up (click that link or Google that for yourself – there’s over 1,000,000 hits right now, which tells you this is not an isolated feeling among just a few developers). The article ‘How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016‘ attracted a huge amount of attention this year, and many followon discussions, but there’s no smoke without fire.
Which brings me to my question. Ten years from now will we look back and say:
- ‘Wow, Facebook React and Flux was so ahead of it’s time. It was a remarkable approach to web development’
or will it be more like:
- ‘Wow. Facebook React and Flux. Why on earth did we think that was a good idea?’