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Pete Hunt: React - Rethinking Best Practices (updated) - JSConf.Asia 2013

JSConf · 57.9K views · 2014-01-03 · 40:58

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Overview

Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram presents React at JSConf.Asia 2013, explaining its design principles and why they seemed shocking at first. He argues that React separates concerns rather than technologies, and the talk also announces the React Chrome developer tools.

On Hacker News

HN commenters credit it with persuading them to adopt React, and cite it for the argument that HTML and JS cannot truly be separated.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2014–2024

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What people said

yazaddaruvala · 2023-06 · Strong recommendation

I'll try one last time: > Sorry none of this makes any sense to me. If you're not familiar with the MVC variants (MVVM, MVP, MVI, MOVE)[0][1] we should start there. Next you should read through some common mistakes of Backbone.js like applications [LINK] and some criticisms of MVC on HackerNews in 2012[0]. Finally if you haven't before these talks, they are the ones that sold me on React: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] - [LINK] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK]

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jasim · 2015-02 · Strong recommendation

This is amazing stuff, thanks Dan! Hopefully it is the beginning of the end of refresh-driven-development. If you are a web developer (front-end/back-end), and you haven't switched to React yet, take this for a spin, and read "Facebook just taught us all how to build websites" ( [LINK] ), and watch 'React - Rethinking Best Practices' by Pete Hunt ( [VIDEO] ). The distinction between the back-end and front-end is a product of the complexity introduced by the web with its 'worse is better' mix of badly integrated tools. It made building user interfaces a dark art with all its quirks: - a layouting system that had an active vendetta against humans - Javascript with all its deficiencies - Connascence introduced by Server <-> Client communication (Server Model <-> API View <-> JS Model <-> JS View) - declarative views that were ill-suited for web-apps (logic-less templates, what a lie!) - cross-browser incompatibilities - difficulty in implementing client-side routing - immature developer tooling But worst of them all was DOM mutation and spaghetti code, which was in reality a fundamental deficiency of the development model itself, and not because web developers the world over were being deliberately irresponsible. React is changing all that with the help of ES6. It simplifies web development both in concept and in practice. In a few years, building UIs would be just another part of writing software, and competent Full-Stack developers would cease to remain unicorns. Here are a fe

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chrisco255 · 2017-08 · Recommendation

JSX & React were literally built to solve Facebook's maintainability concerns, which is one of the most complex client side web apps I can think of. JSX was a hard sell at first 4 years ago, but Pete Hunt did a great job then, explaining how the false separation of concerns between HTML and JS really is unavoidable. You end up with logic in HTML tightly coupled to your JS no matter which way you shake it. [VIDEO] And HTML string template languages have been shown to have numerous shortcomings at scale.

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