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Comment by nogridbag

I believe every UI developer that has used frameworks like Swing has reached a point where specific user interfaces, even those that look trivial, become too complex primarily due to things like event handlers. Trying to figure out a simple thing like why a radio box is enabled and is marked dirty may require long debugging sessions where one event handler for component A triggers another event handler for component B, which triggers another event handler, etc. And before you know it, 50 events were triggered just during the initial mounting of the UI. Making sense of it all is maddening.

And then said developer does what they think feels right: "I have my state and I simply want all the fields to reflect my state". So they try and rewrite the component into some sort of mini immediate-mode style component. All of the event handlers get wired up a single "layoutComponent" method that tries to call all the UI component setters based on the current state with all the problems you alluded to. I know I've done this type of things numerous times before going back all the way to my first internship, well before React was even a thing.

I think modern frameworks solve the reactivity issue this well enough, that it really doesn't matter if the underlying framework is not natively reactive. I will say though that I've primarily used Vue.js where most state is relatively local and we don't try to re-render the world on every input. I think part of the problem with modern dev is likely that React has become the default instead of a simpler framework like Vue.

parent nogridbag 7 months ago

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