Comment by rbbydotdev
16 days ago
Open source tech is a marketplace of ideas. If you have a more perfect alternative then it will prevail.
Granted none of these critics have a viable tried and true alternative. It’s easy to throw shade at any abstraction. None will ever be perfect!
That said, I welcome any new paradigms and ideas. But discounting how far we’ve come with what’s possible on the frontend with hand waves just doesn’t cut it for me.
> Open source tech is a marketplace of ideas. If you have a more perfect alternative then it will prevail.
React has had Facebook promoting it for over a decade… it's hardly a marketplace of ideas… more "Facebook is using this so it must be good enough for us"
I am wondering how much the "perfect alternative then it will prevail" still holds given the amount of money spent on marketing by infrastructure companies, for example Vercel that have an interest in promoting Next.
That’s a fair take. What happened to google’s angular ? Facebook is also historically invested in php, why wasn’t php just good enough? Facebook also had flow, Microsoft typescript won.
Sure these companies have influence, but it’s not all or nothing.
I just don’t buy the whole mass hysteria and funding being responsible for reacts prevalence.
“Frontend purity” reeks of the tired, “lazy unskilled engineers should write software in C and assembly on 16kb memory like the old days”
Reacts success is not from being an air tight optimized and perfect abstraction, it succeeds because it has a scalable abstractions which have relatively good ROI when you learn it even with its warts.
What you mean there’s no viable alternative to react? Is this a joke?