On: I created the exact same app in React and Vue

[bmarkovic]

Recursion IS hard to reason about, and then implementing it efficiently (in a runtime / compiler) is also hard, and then an efficient implementation restricts your expressiveness, and then when someone else needs to read such code, it's hard for them to reason about it.

There are actually a lot of similarities with React.

Neither are useless nor bad per se, but given options, in majority of cases both are more of a smartass thing to do rather than the most optimal or most maintainable / developer friendly thing to do.

[anonytrary → bmarkovic]

> Recursion IS hard to reason about, and then implementing it efficiently (in a runtime / compiler) is also hard

Regarding recursion, I find that recursion is easier to understand than an equivalent while-loop, but maybe it's personal preference. Also, most people shouldn't have to worry about optimizations like tail recursion.

> when someone else needs to read such code, it's hard for them to reason about it.

I'll admit, there are a few negatives with React, but they don't outweigh the positives. Micro-optimizations in user-land should never be seen by designers and if they are, then something is wrong. React's diffing algorithm is a leaky abstraction and forces the designer to be aware of component optimization, since how you break up your components affects how much work the diff has to do.

The new context API is inelegant and it feels like a square peg in a round hole. Additionally, shouldComponentUpdate is the wrong abstraction -- it is very imperative and it pushes you to break your components down into smaller components even if your app's organization suffers.

Reusability and organization should be the only two reasons for creating new components -- performance shouldn't be a plausible reason, because it creates a higher degree of overlap between the developer and the designer.