[JSConfUS 2013] Tom Occhino and Jordan Walke: JS Apps at Facebook

> React was meant to be a way to provide snappy page loads and UX. This is a very common misconception. React was meant to provide one-way data flow. With an app built directly on the DOM you have to deal with the DOM having its own state to manage on top of the state your own code is storing. You have a list of comments in a variable, and a list of DOM elements for each comment, and nothing but your own code is making sure they stay in sync with each other. React changed things so that the state of the DOM is always derived from your own app's state, which eliminates what turned out to be a pretty tedious and error-prone amount of work in complex web apps. It wasn't the first to provide this but its API was unique and compelling vs existing alternatives. The virtual DOM, server-side rendering, etc. are not things that make React faster than non-React code, they are things that counteract the inherent slowness in React's design to make it competitive with non-React code. Watch the original JSConf talk where React was publicly announced and released, and notice how the talk is mostly about the one-way data binding, and the virtual DOM/reconciliation are mentioned in the back half as ways React catches up to non-React app speeds: ▶ this video

> templating languages are horrible and stuck in 2005. An underrated pro of react [1] + typescript is that you get to write your UI logic in regular typescript, Yeah exactly, which is why I always recommend DSLs that embed HTML directly in the language. E.g. link or (my own) link They make writing HTML a breeze with the full power of the programming language available. > We were doing this the same year that React came out, and clearly had some of the same thoughts as Dan Abramov did Dan Abramov is not the original creator of React. That was Jordan Walke: ▶ this video

Yeah. When looking for videos I saw he updated his presentation and gave it again, but there’s raw appeal in that first ‘Rethinking best practices’ talk. Just something coming in out of left field. (Another early presentation: “Tom Occhino and Jordan Walke: JS Apps at Facebook” ▶ this video ) Re: basic concepts, I admit my eyes glaze over by the time I read the heading “Memoization”. Opens with this great sentence though—I like to say ‘view as a function of state’, but he breaks it down even simpler—“The core premise for React is that UIs are simply a projection of data into a different form of data.”