Allergic React.js-ion

I can’t believe it, but the students are currently in their final week of Junior phase. This past 6-week session has felt quicker than any so far.

When I was a student, we spent the last week and a half of the program learning Angular.js, and, as avid readers might remember, I was very fond of it. But technology changes quickly, and Fullstack/Grace Hopper has already updated the curriculum to teach React.js instead of Angular. This means I have been learning a brand new technology, and then pretending I know enough about it to help other people learn it a few hours later.

React has been a bit of a tough sell for me. One thing I really like about Angular is the emphasis on separating concerns. The problem with this is that, in a large scale app, things can become very disorganized. The codebase of Learndot, the website used by Fullstack students, is an excellent example of this. Usually everything works, but when there is a bug it can be very difficult to track down. I have read that Angular is easy to write but hard to maintain for this very reason.

I am surprised, however, how much React seems to solve this problem by taking the exact opposite approach. At least in the workshop that the students have been working on this past week, there is a great deal of shared information between disparate apps. While this makes things clearer, to an extent, I can also imagine this structure getting out of hand in a large-scale application.

I am still very much in the process of learning React, and maybe I will be sold once I have a better sense of typical application structures. But, as of now, my opinion is that one can write clear and maintainable code using either React or Angular. One can also write terrible code using either framework.