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It's downright embarrassing to walk through a Redux-using project with someone competent who's not immersed in the JS world. Source: had to do this recently. It helps if you translate "action creator", "action", and "reducer" to terms that are less misleading in the first two cases, and less uselessly-generic in the last one, but only a little.

I tolerate it for basically "no-one got fired for buying IBM" reasons, i.e. the devs I work with think it's good and it's better to have twice as many problems and none of them be my fault than half as many and all of them be my fault.




I would expand that to say, it's embarrassing/difficult to explain the JS ecosystem to experienced non-JS devs. From "why are there 132MB of packages for hello world?" to "why is there a build process at all", people outside the UI+JS world have a tough time seeing why there's so much complexity for "just the UI".

Also, side note, it's hilarious (and maybe telling) that we both referenced the "no-one got fired for buying IBM" quote...


As an old-school Java dev that's been pulled into the JS world kicking and screaming, I can say that I have a pretty good appreciation for most of the complexity around modern FE builds. NPM legitimately kinda sucked up until the last few releases and is now stabilizing. I get functional programming. I even advocated for react when it was new because it felt so natural and powerful. Redux (or really react-redux) just hasn't hit that sweet spot. That being said I've seen it be hugely successful on big projects.


> "why is there a build process at all", people outside the UI+JS world have a tough time seeing why there's so much complexity for "just the UI".

Having come from cross-plat C++, the JS build system(s) are impressing me, at least the one around React Native.

One data point. :)




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