Guillermo Rauch: Components are an amazing primitive and abstraction — CEO Vercel

components are such an amazing primitive and abstraction that you know it doesn't matter what you're building you probably want to build it with react right like i remember one of my kind of like popular tweets at the time was like it seems to me that we haven't gotten heard about the end of react nor even the beginning of react yet because there's so many more places where this component abstraction will make a lot of sense right and

and that kind of predated react vr existing inc which is a project for using react from the command line like there's so many places that you can put it because fundamentally it was a leap frog in the programming model and that's what i think makes it so strong because the component is just you know how people think you know i i've also said you know react is a lego for adults and you know like it is good to think of the of the of the world that way you know

we've seen the co-evolution of react with with design systems they've kind of gone hand in hand uh with with the ability to like do the work once and then componentize it and then distribute it um when hoax first came out i got really excited because i could i kind of for me that was the moment where i i foresaw that well now we can componentize data and functionality in a way that we couldn't before right like mixing

failed um you know copying and pasting into a component class prototype doesn't quite do it so how do you you know get a hook for data fetching or a hook that encapsulates a behavior like subscribing to a certain event um you know and that that to me was like another really really massive win for raise like oh another like lego bricks for behavior and the other day even like you know i found uh this interesting

uh company that provides a gateway for uh blockchain and they were distributing their api as uh react hooks so like it was that kind of confirmations like wow like i think about 10 years ago you were presenting your new idea to the world and your hello world could have been you know curled and here's the api and that was certainly true for companies like stripe now you're you're presenting some like cool like data binding or data solution or api layer and whatever

and the abstraction has been risen so now you can you you can talk about oh here's my hook that does this thing you know like if firebase came out today it would be selling you on here's the hook right for subscriber data changes right and then i guess uh at that point you could kind of connect to any api and it looks almost exactly the same i mean you just get your data back and you might have some broadcast events or another and what i like about hooks too

is that they almost look like um imperative data fetching code like a equals get b and then use it immediately but that hook is re-entrant so actually it's not even a one-off you know function call it's a function called then gets re-executed in the future the data changed so now we're approaching the time when like react has actually completed a vision and implementation that live up

to their name right like now ria truly is more reactive in a way uh which which is fascinating yeah it's really interesting how it's kind of evolved over time because yeah i remember like when it came out with mixons um everything was kind of just implied so you don't add a mix in and you just get some sort of behavior and you kind of guess as to where it came from totally like what is this gonna do it merges this mixing and what are the consequences of that and then it's almost taken like the