jeffmcmahan

This. People do not understand the implications of the most basic facts of modern science. Gravitation is instantaneous action at a distance via an "occult" force (to quote Newton's contemporaries).

It maps state to a set of reasonably efficient DOM updates that you generally don't have to manage or think about.

Go play around with Angular 1, or BackboneJS, or try building a working SPA with jQuery, and you'll get a sense of the breakthrough that react represented in 2013.

This. Lean on less. I use react and a SQL driver. I have many massive react projects in production.

React is not responsible for the stack of poorly maintained third party packages one chooses to use alongside it. You don't actually need a router, or redux, or other "state management" nonsense. Your application code can/should handle that stuff, and it won't break, and it won't change unless you change it.

Took my 7 year old daughter to a dentist. 8 cavities. Gotta get em right away! Went to another one. All good - zero cavities.

Many dentists are criminals willing to drill holes in children's teeth in order fraudulently take your money.

She's now 15. Never had a cavity ever.

Except that Google and MS search dominate and they can disprefer those not using WEI to "protect" users.

Yes, as usual, our pop science writer with a dim understanding of the issue quotes critics of the Chomskyan paradigm (the study aims to falsify Chomsky’s suspicion that a symbolic operation called “merge” gives humans a unique capacity for deep recursion) and for balance quotes other critics of the Chomskyan paradigm - and never do we hear from the syntacticians (who study recursive grammatical structure as a career).

Forgive me for having chosen pseudo js for the example - and npm. That conflates the issue. I meant to convey an attitude - let some random package do the work, who cares whether it is deep and complex and handling cases I won't ever need, offering API surface that will go unused, and perhaps doing simple things inefficiently. The language doesn't much matter if "ship ship ship rn" is the ethic that drives decision making.

No no you're so right. Let's have 500 packages installed to do multiplication. Zero performance impact, I'm sure.

Why is modern software slow? Because Joe developer's solution to a given problem is to Google up a package that solves the problem, check the license, and then run:

   > { packageMgr } install { randomPkg }

Developer Andy, author of { randomPkg }, does the same thing. And so on, ad infinitum. You want to sum two numbers?

   > npm install node-plus

And the source code will be:

   import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promise'
   import { dirname, join } from 'node:path'
   import additionChecker from 'add-check'

   // redundant useless comments

   return function(n1, n2) {
       // redundant useless comments
       n1 + n2
   }

I lol'd at this. :D

In 2008 or so, Steve Abney (Michigan, linguistics) suggested this book to me while we were discussing a meaning-is-use theory of semantic content. I went straight to the library to get it but their copy was out. Never did get it. Happy to have it now.

I agree with OP 100%. I once went through multiple rounds, got an offer only to discover they wanted to pay me tens of thousands less than I was already making. I'll never engage another company about a job without knowing the salary info ahead of time.