It's funny how we once loved libraries that many now can't stand. Redux and Styled Components were game-changers back in the day, yet perceptions have shifted, even though the libraries themselves haven't changed much (if anything, redux has gotten better). Why is this? - ThreadSky

haz.dev • 133 days ago

It's funny how we once loved libraries that many now can't stand.

Redux and Styled Components were game-changers back in the day, yet perceptions have shifted, even though the libraries themselves haven't changed much (if anything, redux has gotten better).

Why is this?

Comments

ggascoigne.bsky.social•133 days ago

I think redux was fantastic for its time, but it got used in too many places where it wasn’t a good solution. Now we have options and don’t have to use it as a hammer for every screw.

nerdcowboy.bsky.social•133 days ago

Cargo cult. Both were always a suboptimal option to a real problem. They both just had better marketing.

jantimon.bsky.social•133 days ago

it really depends on the usecase and a lot of content creators focus on startups and solo developers

for these devs it’s very important to ship - so not having to learn css is a big plus

blvdmitry.me•133 days ago

I think generally there are two reasons: people understand the environment better/iterate on the original idea to make it better and new browser/other native APIs become available with older libraries struggling to migrate to because of the breaking changes

wojtekmaj.pl•133 days ago

I don’t think these libraries got worse or that we suddenly started "hating" on them. We just have better replacements now - tools that do the same job, only better. I have some projects that use SC and I'm not like "ewwwww gotta rewrite it ASAP", it's just... I wouldn't choose SC for a new project.

mapleleaf.dev•132 days ago

we get drawn in by things that look cool and shiny and pretty and neat (CoffeeScript and derivatives, Angular, Redux Saga, experimental babel plugins) then learn later how hellish they are to work with in practice. it's hard to see all the cracks on paper

haz.dev•133 days ago

Since this pattern seems to repeat endlessly, I wonder which modern libraries will eventually suffer the same fate.

chrispardy.dev•133 days ago

New things do it differently and you realize there's a "better" way to do these things.

That said I still really like Redux and Styled Components.

kettanaito.com•133 days ago

Some of those libraries were innovative, others were the best there was. I believe Redux was openly admitted to be a mistake for most apps, but yet everybody was using Redux left and right.

Tech is an ever-turning wheel. Things come, things go. It just spins times faster for JavaScript.

geekhart.bsky.social•132 days ago

Redux Saga was a mistake. Modern Redux with Redux Toolkit is amazing.

kettanaito.com•133 days ago

But there's also a factor that we often don't know what we want. Apps demand so much, and web languages often aren't suited for a lot of requirements. A lot of tools gain traction through influencers and retain about as well as honest those influencers were.

kettanaito.com•133 days ago

When it comes to tooling, I always encourage people to just try things and decide for themselves. I guess I was burnt by maintaining a huge app where all state was in Redux when I started engineering. Really put thought into figuring out what this library helps you solve.

kettanaito.com•133 days ago

It's funny to me how there's this FOMO around cutting-edge tech, and yet falling behind may be the best thing to do for your career. There were so many cases when I fell behind the most shiny things only to think on them years later when everyone has collectively moved away from them. Yeah.

kettanaito.com•133 days ago

I think a natural progression of tools is either give way to better tools or become integral in the language. A lot of things have made it to HTML/CSS/JavaScript from what developers have built by themselves: URLPattern, Popover API, Promise.withResolvers, etc. It's awesome to see.

kettanaito.com•133 days ago

* CSS4 nesting from LASS. It's a really long list if one sits to count.

saeris.gg•133 days ago

I think they were the best tools to solve problems at the time which didn't have better solutions available. Some of it was learning about their downsides too and having to optimize for their performance issues.

IMO, CSS just got a lot better and I can accomplish almost everything with CSS modules.

saeris.gg•133 days ago

I think if it weren't for CSS Modules and CSS Custom Properties (variables) then I would still be using Styled-Components. Today I just can't justify the runtime cost when there are so few situations where I need a computed property that I can't just pass through a CSS variable in a style attribute.

jantimon.bsky.social•132 days ago

would love to know what you think about the idea of next-yak

it compiles styled-components into css modules with css variables

at runtime it only changes classnames and css variables

ericclemmons.com•132 days ago

I think the skeptics for Redux were ignored and drowned out by the cargoculting.

At the time though, “flux” didn’t have good ergonomics so people wanted *something*.

CSS Modules, nesting, and vars had to advance to displace css-in-js.

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