As someone who didn't get react at all before hooks, and still doesn't 100% get react with class components (but is quite proficient with hooks) what's the issue with hooks specifically? genuinely curious. I find react with class components very messy, and especially in the basic components, I find useState + useEffect a lot cleaner and easy to reason about than setState and all the lifecycle hooks...
I had a project where state was coming through redux, from parents via props, context somewhere from parent elements, xhr fetch/graphql, local storage... Debugging was hell. I've always hated hooks, they replaced easy and clear lifecycle functions and rely on magic to work, literally don't function like regular js functions but look like regular functions
> Debugging was hell. I've always hated hooks, they replaced easy and clear lifecycle functions and rely on magic to work, literally don't function like regular js functions but look like regular functions
You know, with how hooks work in Vue, things seem be easier to understand and get started with.
Though at least with React I've had plenty of projects end up with render loops that are hard to debug because of how everything is written. So much so, that I wrote a blog post about it a while back "Modern React is broken": https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/modern-reac...
Personally I wish that we could already have some tooling that'd tell you something along the lines of:
Render loop detected! The following chain of calls was responsible for it: A -> B -> C -> A -> B -> ...
Please check the useEffect hook on line X, which has the following items in its dependency array which changed: [Y, Z]
React components don't function like regular JS functions, but look like regular functions. So that's obviously not a legitimate knock against them - you're working within the React runtime. It's not normal Javascript.
And lifecycle methods are just as "magical" as hooks. If you just thought about why the "rules of hooks" exist for a moment instead of just hating change for the sake of it existing, you could probably intuit how they work under the hood.
Lastly, lifecycle methods don't allow you to co-locate feature-related code, can actually create more bugs (if you have logic in `componentDidMount` but forget to add something similar to `componentDidUpdate` for example), and any logic contained within lifecycle methods isn't composable / reusable.
I really don't understand where you're coming from at all with this.
React should act like a framework/library, not become a transpiler and create javascript 2.0. It's hugely confusing, and harder to reason. I shouldn't have to learn about internals of the library to figure out what's wrong with my code. it's a smell of bad library, this wasn't the problem when simple class functions were used as lifecycle methods.
