Oh, this I can tell. For one thing, it's very easy to get stale closures if one isn't careful. For another, hooks are a reactivity mechanism that is tied to the re-rendering of the whole component (what if you don't want to re-render the component? what if you only want to perform a side effect when a particular value changes?). Third, the docs are sowing confusion by discouraging the very natural, and often inevitable, concept of side effects, as well as by removing the concept of component's lifecycle (there is no idiomatic way of telling react to please run certain logic only once when the component mounts)[0].
0 - https://react.dev/learn/reusing-logic-with-custom-hooks#keep...
https://react.dev/reference/react/useEffect
That is literally what useEffect is for! Describe your side effect, provide a list of values that you want the hook to watch for when they change. `useEffect(someEffect, [value1, value2, value3])`
> the very natural, and often inevitable, concept of side effects
React uses a functional programming model. Always has. Watch the Honeypot React documentary and notice how many times the earliest adopters say they were excited to have way to express UIs functionally. Functional programmers believe in minimizing side effects. If you don't like the paradigm, there are 1000 other UI frameworks that use an imperative model. Complaints like yours read like someone complaining that their screwdriver isn't a hammer.
No, sorry; for useEffect to fire, a prop or a state needs to change; which means that the component is going to re-render. My point is that sometimes we want to observe properties passed to the component for side-effect purposes without re-rendering the component.
> Functional programmers believe in minimizing side effects.
In order to do something — anything — in the real world, we need side effects. Even Haskellers know this :-)
Second, side effects are just about in every React component where you use a hook.
Third, (hypothesis) `useEffect` is probably a misnomer that stick there because it would be a breaking change to rename it to something more proper.
Words and bickering aside, you can write great applications with React, that's fact. It is also a fact that a lot of folks are using it wrong, which shows either a problem with React learnability itself, or with its documentation, or well, with the programmers themselves.
Let computers do what they're good at so that we devs can concentrate on the actual problems being solved.
