> It’s not exaggeration to say that the web has set UIs back by decades.
These claims always seem to break down once you ask for concrete examples.
1. The React/JS code is far simpler and less clunky than the Objective-C equivalent.
2. The HTML commandfor/command is declarative and simple unlike Objective-C target/selector
Paste the HTML commandfor snippet from TFA and ask an LLM what the Objective-C equivalent. If you think it's less clunky, go ahead and paste it here for us to judge. ;)
> It required several screenfuls of obscure and brittle code.
Yet still better than the brittle, obscure horrors of the procedural Objective-C Cocoa apps I used to have to work on.
"1.1. The React/JS code is far simpler and less clunky than the Objective-C equivalent.
Hard disagree - in objective C, I never had to worry about making sure I (and every library I use) calls hooks in the exact same order on every single render, for example.
It does this for 'brittle" reasons - it associates state with the order of hooks.
(For any react folks - this isn't meant as judgement as much as an explanation :P)
Since i'm semi-retired, and only do this for fun, i spent a a week last month chasing down react hook usage bugs in libraries my app depended on and sending patches. I think i got up to 23. Because the ecosystem in javascript is so deep on dependencies, you often depend on an amazing amount of people getting everything correct. This was much less true in Obj-C as well.
Some of them had also made 'the error go away' by moving code to useCallback's inside setTimeouts so they wouldn't be noticed by the hook checker (but this in turn has no guarantee of ordering wrt to react effects, of course), leading to even more subtle bugs.
I won't even get into things like async in react vs objective-C (though to be fair, bad integration with async afflicts a lot of popular JS frameworks)
In the end:
React is fine once you learn it.
Obj-C is fine once you learn it.
But acting like react is not clunky or brittle is, and obj-c is, is definitely a stretch.
All of the things here are clunky and brittle, just in different ways :)
These claims always seem to break down once you ask for concrete examples.
1. The React/JS code is far simpler and less clunky than the Objective-C equivalent.
2. The HTML commandfor/command is declarative and simple unlike Objective-C target/selector
Paste the HTML commandfor snippet from TFA and ask an LLM what the Objective-C equivalent. If you think it's less clunky, go ahead and paste it here for us to judge. ;)
> It required several screenfuls of obscure and brittle code.
Yet still better than the brittle, obscure horrors of the procedural Objective-C Cocoa apps I used to have to work on.