Exactly, it is a bet. A bet in which you can win nothing more than a refined résumé, or lose a lot of time.
In the context of web development, in the past 10 years I have seen other developers and myself write wrappers for the same JavaScript libraries again and again and again in so many frameworks and for so many CMS I lost track and count (incomplete list: typo3, Drupal, Wordpress, GWT, jQuery, AngularJS, React). This usually included weeks of work, after which it was possible to write web applications which could've been written with vanilla JavaScript on a static, handwritten HTML page in a single afternoon. From a macroeconomic point of view, it was all just an incredible waste of time. But the customers of the various companies I worked at as a student and after finishing university loved hearing the name of the frameworks. I am pretty convinced that it actually would've been enough to just write bare JS code and a HTML page by hand and sell it to them as "written in bootstrapped AngularJS". This would've saved hundreds of man hours.
> This usually included weeks of work, after which it was possible to write web applications which could've been written with vanilla JavaScript on a static, handwritten HTML page in a single afternoon.
You can have a website up and running (not just locally, but live on the Internet) within literally 5 minutes using React and Heroku, netlify, now.sh or whatever. If it takes weeks to do that, you're doing something fundamentally wrong.
It did not weeks to write the website, sorry if that was not clear from my original post. It took weeks to port existing JavaScript libraries into the ecosphere of the respective framework, to a point where it was indeed possible to write the website we wanted in 5 minutes.
> You can have a website up and running (not just locally, but live on the Internet) within literally 5 minutes using React and Heroku, netlify, now.sh or whatever.
Of course, I am not disputing this! But it is equally possible to have a website up in literally 5 minutes using vanilla JS + HTML + CSS and an nginx Server, without taking the dangerous bet that the framework you have chosen won't be obsolete in 2 years.
> without taking the dangerous bet that the framework you have chosen won't be obsolete in 2 years
That's why I specifically mentioned React and its API, as it's generic enough to have drop-in replacements or even frameworks that apply its basics to completely different kinds of rendering (https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink). I find it unlikely that the basic idea of component trees, efficient one-way rendering of updated data, and JSX rendering will go away anytime soon, and none of that depends on the specific project named "React".
> A bet in which you can win nothing more than a refined résumé, or lose a lot of time.
I strongly disagree. Perhaps if you dont really have a problem that needs React to solve it. I understand you already had extensive expertise solving this problem in JS without React et all.
Exactly, it is a bet. A bet in which you can win nothing more than a refined résumé, or lose a lot of time.
In the context of web development, in the past 10 years I have seen other developers and myself write wrappers for the same JavaScript libraries again and again and again in so many frameworks and for so many CMS I lost track and count (incomplete list: typo3, Drupal, Wordpress, GWT, jQuery, AngularJS, React). This usually included weeks of work, after which it was possible to write web applications which could've been written with vanilla JavaScript on a static, handwritten HTML page in a single afternoon. From a macroeconomic point of view, it was all just an incredible waste of time. But the customers of the various companies I worked at as a student and after finishing university loved hearing the name of the frameworks. I am pretty convinced that it actually would've been enough to just write bare JS code and a HTML page by hand and sell it to them as "written in bootstrapped AngularJS". This would've saved hundreds of man hours.