
I have a problem with React and spend a lot of time talking to my therapist - thomasbibby
https://www.sonniesedge.net/posts/react/
======
ramblerman
> So, Reactgate has become a thing. What's been fomenting for a while blew up
> last week, with two prominent White Men In Tech having little tantrum
> Twitter breaks, and a wonderful woman of colour working as a dev/designer
> feeling she is no longer welcome in our industry and planning to leave as
> soon as it's financially possible.

God. Its so creepy casually stereotyping people by their race and gender in
this manner.

Ironically it’s always from so called social justice moralists.

It reminds me of the Stephen fry quote about the church and sex.

> It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex,
> absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and
> rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s
> fun, it’s jolly; because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark
> and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more
> exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the
> morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic Church in a
> nutshell.

These blog authors seem to have an analogous obsession with gender and race.

~~~
azhu
While I agree with you that it's problematic, a minority woman stereotyping a
white man is not quite the same as in reverse if you see relative social
positioning as a first class factor. The reasoning for why it's different is
something like the reasoning for why it's generally fine for employees to get
together and casually bond over being annoyed by their bosses but the same
thing going the other way would be obviously inappropriate. A lot of people
experience being of minority race, gender, and culture as constructs that
basically equate to having been born holding the short end of an implicit
employee-boss relationship. As such, it's something that's naturally at the
forefront of their minds.

------
k__
Someone wrongly accused a well known React dev of being a white supremacist
for things that didn't happen.

Now people are, rightfully, angered about the false accusations, but the
accusers use this to say "see, we said you are toxic!"

Guess we gonna have fallout from this bullshit a long time...

~~~
bayesian_horse
It seems like the well known React developer has a somewhat more ...
illustrous ... history of questionable behavior, so while he may not be an
actually white supremacist, he does seem to fit a certain toxic mold.

On the other hand, the mentioned female developer has probably had quite a lot
of such experiences with direct and indirect racism, perceived or actual, but
either she kept quiet or it didn't blow up that much.

~~~
sweeneyrod
Are you referring to the behaviour described here
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g4oh2GGZOsucZfT1YJ5wjDUS...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g4oh2GGZOsucZfT1YJ5wjDUSk3ntbM3RNAxVs528-NM/preview)
(for instance using the words "guys", "stupid" and "crazy") or something else?

~~~
layoutIfNeeded
The word “guys” means something bad in the U.S.?

Sorry, English is not my native language, and I’m genuinely interested because
I’ve been using this word quite often and didn’t know it’s offensive.

~~~
bayesian_horse
Depends on context. If you are a female developer and get constantly referred
to as "guy" or to be part of "guys", it's at best annoying.

Just as "guys" don't like to get called "girls".

~~~
layoutIfNeeded
I see! I didn’t know this was the case in the US. I’ve checked my English
dictionary and it says:

>guys: Informal Persons of either sex.

I guess it’s one of those differences between British and American English.
Good to know, because it seems like one could easily get in trouble for using
it incorrectly (in the British sense) in the US!

Thanks!

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Yes, this is country specific, and girls who take offense are primarily in the
USA or have learned American English.

~~~
k__
The problem doesn't seem to be that it is male in some places and neutral in
others, but that it's considered neutral even tho' it's clearly male.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Guy is only clearly male in American English. Guy Fawkes was male of course,
but the term “some anonymous guy” does not refer to anyone in particular. The
word has clearly evolved differently in the states than it did in the UK which
originated it.

~~~
bayesian_horse
That's a big "only" when we are talking about American developers at an
American Conference.

------
machinecontrol
Serious, not intended to flame bait question: Why is race/gender featured so
prominently in this technical post? Would it be appropriate to open a post
with “black men in tech had a twitter meltdown”?

~~~
thecatspaw
I was wondering that as well. However I am not sure I would call it a
technical post. To me it reads more like the rant of a person who hates react
because it was written by facebook.

~~~
bayesian_horse
Another issue is that there is a much more serious and extensive history of
value judgements about "black" people, rather than about "white" people.

At least in the US there never was widespread slavery of white people because
they are white, or widespread ideas of white skin color being associated with
lesser intelligence, culture or whatever.

It is, however, very important not to get hung up in racist terminology. For
example it only serves the racists' cause to argue who is actually black or
who is actually white, or how much of each.

It's not like the average heckler on the street asks somebody where he is
from, his religion, what he is doing for a living or what his ancestral gene
mixture is!

~~~
spraak
> For example it only serves the racists' cause to argue who is actually black
> or who is actually white, or how much of each.

When you're treated better the lighter/whiter you are, then it makes sense why
people would argue about it

~~~
bayesian_horse
It makes sense for people who think they can benefit from that racism,
therefor serving the racist cause.

------
alessioalex
> Mobile devices simply don't have the CPU and memory to cope well with
> client-side JS apps.

I think they do, but most client-side JS apps are horribly designed. They load
the whole bundle at once, display ads, have setTimeouts and other unnecessary
things that add to the bloat.

Native apps aren't great either, I hate the Twitter and Reddit ones, they
constantly fail to load stuff, block and restart.

~~~
_def
> They load the whole bundle at once [...]

Isn't this a good thing? Genuinely asking.

~~~
alessioalex
It depends. If I'm never planning on visiting the "live dashboard" of some
website then all the extra code that is loaded for that feature is useless to
me. That's why separate bundles exists (with browserify, webpack etc).

------
mezi
What is this madness? Is this a tech article? Is this what good content looks
like on the internet? Is React racist? Do people simply spend too much time on
twitter?

I have so many questions and hope to never have to answer any of them.

------
flippinburgers
This is not a tech article and shouldn't be listed. I read the summary of
twitter remarks and am constantly amazed by how sensitive people appear to be.

... I should have left it alone as soon as I saw the comments about capitalism
being shit and intersectionalism being a real thing.

~~~
thomasbibby
I thought it offered some valid technical criticisms of React: specifically
that it's over engineered and it results in a bad user experience, especially
on mobile.

I thought the article offered an interesting argument that front end
development has suffered from increasing over-engineering in the last decade,
and this over-engineering can be explained by cultural factors and the
influence of large corporations like Facebook.

~~~
thecatspaw
That would be fair critic points. Unfortunately the post gets overshadowed by
the authors personal opinions

------
quantummkv
> In classic fashion, the most privileged 1% of developers (as in those with
> the most free time - young, white, able-bodied men) saw the newly released
> React and fell over themselves to be in on The Latest Interesting
> Technology.

I am a brown guy in a 3rd world country who has been using react for long
enough to be an early adopter. Reading this suddenly transformed me into a
6.6ft, white skinned, blue eyed Aryan wet dream.

> The concept of "We Live In A Meritocracy" becomes firmly implanted in the
> community.

> We reach today, where two prominent React community leaders quit Twitter
> rather than deal with accusations of emerging white nationalism and
> machismo-fueled poor behavior.

> The popularity of React is fueled by corporate-sponsorship, a tech industry
> seeking validation by becoming Hard and Masculine, and aggressive Capitalist
> principles (validation through work, market dominance, a continuous supply
> of skilled Labor) that result in Things being placed before People.

This is next level satire, right? right? Or at least something generated by an
AI bot fuelled by China/Russia/Ghost of USSR. And the comments below the
article take the cake. I have seen better comments on threads in /b/

~~~
azhu
Being brown in a white place is a different experience than being brown in a
brown place. There is a lot of friction when different enough groups coexist.
If you've ever found yourself in maybe a job or something where you thought
differently enough from the people around you to feel like they were more
interested in just maintaining their bubble of how they understand the world
than discovering the best way to be, it's that same mechanism in action. Just
it's blown up to much larger proportions since it's not just you differing
with people who share your race, culture, ideas about how society should
function, etc.

------
viach
"React" and "white supremacist" words in a single blog post won't deliver any
good kind of discussion imho)

------
bayesian_horse
I still think React is a wonderful library and feels like a more natural way
to express a dynamic web page. Other frameworks get into your face a lot more.

It does seem like a lot of the grievances in this post are about arbitrary
choices by the author or the teams using React as part of their stack.

Maybe I'm not attached enough to React that I can understand the problem.

------
viburnum
The last two projects I worked on that used React, it was pretty obvious that
there it served no purpose other than to make webdev into “hard” software
engineering. Even the tiniest design changes required expensive software devs
to implement them. Good for me but it cost the client a fortune.

------
layoutIfNeeded
Can somebody give me a quick rundown on this react-gate?

~~~
k__
Someone talked to someone else.

The first person misunderstood the second.

The first person started accusing a well know React dev of being a white
supremacist on Twitter because of that misunderstanding.

People who care about social justice rallied to the first persons cause,
saying React would protect white supremacists.

React devs didn't know anything about the accused dev being a WS, because he
wasn't one.

It got all cleared up that the dev was wrongly accused and the accuser
publicly apologized.

React devs got angry that people who care about social justice can run around
and ruin peoples lifes with false accusations.

------
blacksoil
Although there are lots of cases where React is overused, for example in
mostly-static pages that don't really benefit from automated state bindings,
there are situations when React is nice. I just recently came back to Android
development scene, and React Native actually makes it super easy to do simple
Android dev. While it couldn't be used in all use-cases, for prototyping and
getting simple things done quickly, it seems like a pretty promising
technology.

------
have_faith
> The popularity of React is fueled by corporate-sponsorship, a tech industry
> seeking validation by becoming Hard and Masculine, and aggressive Capitalist
> principles

Uh, huh.

------
GrumpyNl
Despite the race / gender notions, the rant is very recognizable.

