Comment by pavlov

Nice tutorials. I've been playing around with React, and I like it overall... But I can't wrap my head around Redux. Could someone explain it to me so I might finally see the light?

My problem is this: I just can't understand why I'd want to manipulate state in an unsightly switch statement like this one from Chapter 4 of the original post:

  switch (action.type) {
    case 'CHANGE_LOCATION':
      return Object.assign({}, state, {
        location: action.location
      });
    case 'SET_SELECTED_TEMP':
      return Object.assign({}, state, {
        selected: {
          temp: action.temp,
          date: state.selected.date
        }
      });
    case 'SET_SELECTED_DATE':
      return Object.assign({}, state, {
        selected: {
          date: action.date,
          temp: state.selected.temp
        }
      });
    default:
      return state;
  }

This reminds me of Win32 event loops with their window message handler switches... And that's a scary association.

What's the point with dispatching these fragile "stringly-typed" selectors, when you can just have real functions doing setState() updates on the relevant component?

I'm not trying to be snarky -- I know I'm missing something major here.