[not OP but I can remember feeling the same, also I haven't done a big redux project in about a year]

I haven't looked at the docs in a while but I'm not sure that's where the big problem lies. The hard thing about Redux is that you need to "get" the core concepts (not that complex), and how they interplay with how (and when) React renders component subtrees (very complex - this requires a new understanding of react you didn't need before).

After you learn React and finally "get" it you definitely won't get Redux. Not because of Redux perse, but because the way you structure your application is so different. After that you'll encounter more subjective questions like do we put this (semi localized) state in Redux? And there are no right answers anymore, just opinions.

Also the boilerplate doesn't help.

It wasn't the Redux docs, it was the entire mindframe of Redux. This connects to that which connects to that and sets this while this gets that. Like I said, I'm a terrible programmer and I have a hard time keeping complex interactions in my mind. If this block of code needs to change a variable, I want it to just change the variable right there and move on. Having to write the code that needs to change the variable, then switching to another file to write the code that actually changes the variable, then switching to another file to write the code that returns that new variable to my original function is just... so damn unnecessary. There's just too many moving parts that can (and do) break. It's so complex, and when something doesn't work I struggle to debug why.

I will admit I did not choose to use Redux, it was part of a tutorial I was following on Udemy. I never got the hang of it, and once I figured out React Native well enough, I quickly scaled back my reliance on Redux. It's made my life a lot easier.

My day job is a technical consultant for a major tech company, and we have meetings to discuss the meeting we're going to have before the meeting. The administrative overhead of Redux reminds me of that in a very bad way. Instead of my Facebook login button calling auth_actions.js which then returns the auth token to auth_reducer.js which then returns the auth token to auth_screen.js (but don't forget to add it to the combineReducers in index.js), I just put the authentication code in 'await doAuth()' inside of the auth_screen.js file. I've never heard a convincing reason as to why I shouldn't do that, even though the tutorial I followed said it's a bad idea.

It very well could be a problem with the tutorial I was using, where the author leaned too heavily on using Redux for everything. I wildly scaled back my usage of Redux after I got going. It's just too many moving parts, and I've never figured out how to debug it when something doesn't work. I end up with 'console.log("we made it to the action")' and 'console.log("we made it to the reducer")' and then 'console.log("we made it to mapstatetoprops")' followed by 'console.log("so why the hell is this.state.fbToken still null!?")'. Then I come to find out I forgot to add auth_reducer to the combineReducers in my reducers/index.js.

I can't count the number of hours I've lost to stuff like this.

Per my other comment just above ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18784238 ), please try out our new `redux-starter-kit` package and see how much it simplifies things for you:

https://redux-starter-kit.js.org/

Yeah, I mean I see this article as a not-so-subtle middle finger to computer science elitists, so I don't think backlash was unexpected (on the contrary, welcomed).

React itself represents a shift in webdev thought where, instead of desperately trying to establish itself as a "respectable" programming field (see: any Google web technology), it instead focuses on being as accessible as possible and embraces the populist nature of the web. This article is just an extension of that ideology.

And, as you've indicated, anyone who would be horrified by that ideology probably is already horrified by the web to begin with.

Meh. I wrote C# for 13 years of my career, starting with .NET 1.0. I worked at Microsoft, writing C# services, I worked for consultancies writing C# servers, clients, and web apps.

I’ve been doing full time JS with some Ruby for the past 5 years. I doubt I could write anything more than “Hello world” in C# without a lot of Googling.

> It scares me off for the same reason that hundreds of thousands of people use dynamic languages, and I still believe that this is far from being a good idea.

> The same way that hundreds of millions of people believe in god, and I still think this is absurd.

Well, that takes the idea of a 'programming language holy war' to a very literal place.

Forgetting the details of a specific language syntax is _not_ the same thing as "not knowing how types work".