React is a programming language for UIs

i'm not much of a details person [Music] if you talk to anyone who knows me they'll tell you just how bad my memory is now don't get me wrong i can be a perfectionist if i'm really focused on something but when it comes to the nitty-gritty i feel like my brain capacity just fills up really fast and that's one reason that i've always loved frameworks

frameworks take care of so many little details i feel safe when i use them like they've got my back because i know they've thought through all the things that could go wrong while i'm building an app now when i started using react i was coming from years of experience with frameworks like ruby on rails and ember and these frameworks take care of so many things for you sometimes you don't even know how they work which can be both a good thing and a bad thing so what i want to do right now is

compare how the creators and maintainers of these frameworks think about the tools they work on and i think the difference is going to surprise you to start off here's dhh from the initial rails tutorial that was announced almost 15 years ago now we create a template look at all the things i'm not doing look at all the configuration i'm not writing all these things are mapped together just automatically so rails does a whole lot of stuff to cut down on the amount

of code and the amount of repetition you need in your field and here he is more recently in 2018 i like to think that what we've been doing is a lot of this conceptual compression that we've taken a lot of concepts that people use to worry about and have to figure out from first principles and then we've turned them into something that most people don't have to worry about most of the time so when i think about as a framework builder what is it that that i do it is to think about it in the sense that

can we take a concept and basically compress it in such a way that you can get 80 of the value of that concept in about 20 of the effort or better and lastly i can't help but quote this beautiful line straight from the ruby on rails doctrine it says there are so many conventions and rails that a beginner doesn't even need to know about but can just benefit from an ignorance it's possible to create great applications without knowing why everything is the way it is this is

more or less the world i was coming from so you can imagine the surprise that was in store for me when i started diving in to react i knew react was just a library but i still expected to get a lot of help from it when it came time to building my app i remember on my very first side project just trying to add a link that when clicked loaded some data and rendered a new page well there's nothing in react called load data or transition or

anything like that there's something lower level called use effect which is meant for side effects okay i thought i guess that loading data is a side effect so let me try this thing out you pass in a function and okay here's where i can load my data and that seems to work out all right then we also have this rendering logic here but i can't render it until my data comes back so now recipe is undefined and i'm seeing this error and now i need

to handle this new case now at this point i'm already asking myself am i doing this right i mean i've been through the tutorial i've read the docs but i couldn't find a single example of doing something which is pretty basic as far as apps go loading data for a page and this is where those feelings of doubt start to creep in see ember and rails have first class apis for this sort of thing and in fact most of the things you need to do in those apps there's kind of one