I have a friend who is a real software developer, and he let me come in and meet their team and hang out with them for a couple of hours to see what they do. I told one of the developers that I was learning React, and he said kind of jokingly “Oh, that should be around for another 3 months!”
Do other people have that same sense, that React won’t be around much longer? I chatted with him a little more, and he said that it’s fine, and if you’re a developer you’re always learning new frameworks, and he said that he himself has learned dozens. In the end, he said it’s probably not a waste of time to learn it, but just to know that once you learn it, there’ll be something else around the corner to learn.
I guess if you want to go into this field, you probably just have to be cool with that. I thought it was kind of interesting though. Anybody have any thoughts about it?
EVERYTHING… and I mean EVERYTHING goes out of style/obsolete. It’s just a question of time.
Programming is a never-ending learning cycle.
At some point, you have to make a decision and pick on what next new thing to learn. It’s almost like betting … investing your time and energy on what the next thing you have to learn to keep going. Sometimes the bet doesn’t pay off, sometimes it pays off big and you win big… like a stock market price going up and way up. Or sometimes the bet you picked crashed and died.
I don’t think its going anywhere for now. At the very least there have been more and more projects and jobs coming out. Recently (last 6 months) I noticed my React Dev Tools flashing brightly when I loaded twitch.tv. So big companies other than Facebook are also starting to use it. To be honest new frameworks usually pop up when there is a considerable problem that current frameworks cannot solve in a decent way. And you can recognize a lot of the stuff you learned before in the new frameworks. Either way the knowledge you gain from programming in any framework is always worth the time you spent.
They’re just joking. Web development is known for having a million tools to learn, and web developers are thought of as fickle in their preferences. The reality is that once a framework or library is chosen, the project is pretty much stuck with it until it’s so old that it will have to be replaced. React and Angular both have what it takes to stick around long-term - huge communities, use outside of browsers, integration with other popular tools, and backing from some of the biggest tech firms in the known universe.
React is still trending up. It hasn’t caught up to Angular, but it not “dying” by any stretch of the imagination. And I am interested to see if React Native becomes a “thing”.
I’ve been looking at Vue.js as an alternative. It’s apparently easier to learn than React and is similar. So if you don’t want to invest time to learn React, this could be an idea. Just a thought.
From what I read, React is not going anytime soon though. It is massively successful.
They could have called version 2.x anything but Angular 2. It’s such a different animal from Angular 1.x that if you invested time and energy learning Angular 1.x, only to be told “too bad, everything you know is now useless.” React picked a lot of new users at this point. I guess if you’re going to learn something new, might as well look-see around and try going across the street and see what’s new over there.
I really like Vue. Now, if only Vue can have the big backing of a famous company (“backing” meaning real financial backing, and not just some giant company using Vue as an end-userr), I think Vue has the potential to become the next big thing.
I’ve heard very often from other devs and people new to programming that angular feels more overwhelming compared to react. It somewhat makes sence because after all Angular is a framework and react is a library for build ui. At its core react doesn’t have routing or state containers. At first when you learn react you just focus on building ui and that alone. Once you figure the core of react you remember there was this thing called urls so you go and learn react-router. And when state starts to become a pain to manage you add redux. So there is this incremental approach to learning new concepts with react. Also JSX is a blessing. While in a vanilla app seperating html and js feels natural in a framework where conponents are a central concept it is just annoying and frustrating.
I wouldn’t be concerned with React going out of style:
Lots of jobs are in old/antiquated technologies (i.e. JavaEE) and those companies are in no hurry to chance it up.
A bunch of shops will build a react stack. And not change it for 5 years. Because - while we love to learn - these companies don’t like “new”.
Familiar. Predictable.
Put your worries behind you. If anything, you’ll find job security, given the rapid adoption of React in the industry.
Here’s a different view of that indeed chart, but including the different ways people might look for react versus angular. As you can see interest in Angular is still really high from job seekers, but React is also trending upward pretty well.
It was a joke, I assume. But it would be foolish to worry either way. If it dies, it’ll die a relatively slow and painful death.
Hell, jQuery’s been dead for years, and it’s still being used. Have you seen Weekend at Bernie’s? jQuery is Bernie. Every Bernie has its weekend. Some even have sequels.
React is not a monotheistic religion, nor is it the latest in fashionable footwear. It’s a bunch of code piled on a bunch of other code that helps you write more code.
And finally, by the time you know about it, it’s already uncool. The people who made it cool are into something else now.
I will answer what people never really want to hear : Focus on Pure Javascript, and use frameworks only if this is relevant to your needs. Everything under the sun comes and goes, but I see too many front end devs jumping from a framework to another without the understanding of the DOM. You end up with what they call the banana problem : you ask for a banana, then you get the banana, the gorilla holding it and the entire jungle. (ie : loading JQuery just to handle a few listeners)
React seems to be great with Redux, and given its download rate, it should be there for quite a longtime. Again, the syntax is very simple when you feel comfortable with vanilla Js, but if one does’nt have good basis, then it can be very hard to learn.
Facebook opensourced React in 2013 after using internally in production for years. Also, being backed by Facebook likely means React will be around for a while.
React has a massive open source community supporting it creating good solutions to supplement React: router, redux, etc.
React’s design approach influenced other major frameworks towards a component-based architecture (e.g. Angular, Vue, etc).
I think React will continue to rise in demand. Maybe in the future it will be supplanted by something other more innovative technology, but I think for the immediate future React will only continue to rise in usuage and usefulness. The only reason I got the job I have now is because I learned React through freeCodeCamp.
Also, my personal view it that Sure, the front-end world is changing dramatically and all the time. However, I think the last 3-5 years have really seen major innovations in the front-end landscape as websites move more toward single-page applications. The JavaScript world has been in turmoil trying to develop best practices and technology to support this reality of dynamic web applications (moving away from the paradigm of static pages that talk to the server 1 request at a time and reload the entire page). The web is now a software platform. I think in time the community will iron out many of the major problems and the best solutions will rise to the top and become dominant players. It’s unlikely the rapid rate of change will continue indefinitely. My view is we are getting closer to that point now.
React is deceptively powerful. It’s a simple component API (11 methods) but really you start to realize its power in the fact that the DOM was completely abstracted away. DOM is just one of infinite targets that React can hit. That’s why React Native can render native components. That’s why server side rendering appeared on Node.js first with React. That’s why Facebook recently released React VR (https://facebook.github.io/react-vr/). That’s why Microsoft released its own React library for writing Windows applications (https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows). React’s implications are only just beginning to be explored. React’s growth will continue because we haven’t fully explored all the implications of React yet.
Vue is awesome and super easy to pick up. It’s just like React as well. I think it’s going to make a super big appearance in large companies / startups in the next 12 months. I would love to see FCC potetially incorporate it into the curriculum, simply because the learning curve is almost non-existent. Probably it’s just as easy to learn jQuery as it is Vue !
