React and the Initial The Learning Curve.
As I was learning the React framework, I must admit. I struggled a bit. I had thought that the React framework would be something simple to understand. I thought it would be a similar experience to when I learned Python. Python was an easy language to learn because I was coming from C++ and Java. With C++, you have some basic data structures and pointers. In contrast, Python has higher-level abstractions where you don’t need to worry about things like memory. Since it’s a weakly typed language, you don’t need to be precise either.
I thought React would be the same way. I already knew a bit of CSS, HTML, and Javascript. React is supposed to make these processes more manageable.
Well. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. React is complex. There is the prop and state system for one. Also, it requires a lot of ‘wiring up’. For example, for a child component to cause a parent component to rerender, you must use a callback function. Not only that, you have to ensure that you can bind functions so that they don’t lose their parent reference. In a sense, I realized that callbacks are the ‘bread and butter of React. And if you don’t have a good understanding of callbacks, you may end up struggling as I did initially.
However, now that I’ve gotten over the hump. I can now appreciate the versatility of React and how it makes a lot of dynamic aspects of web development much more effortless.
However, it was a steep learning curve. And I’ve barely understood enough to start working with it on a more manageable level. It’s a learning experience that I want to keep in mind because now that I think about how React works, it actually seems a lot simpler. But to get to the stage of something seeming more simple took weeks. Weeks of fighting against the system and hours of debugging things whenever I made a mistake.
I want to keep this in mind because it’s important to be sympathetic to others when they are initially struggling to learn a new stack. I know I’ve had my share of people impatient with me when something seemed so easy to them, where I’m having difficulty working the ins and outs of a stack. But once I learned it, it also now ‘appears’ less complex than it initially did. That is an illusion. It is complex, but our minds have abstracted the details.
I don’t want to be that person that gets frustrated or impatient with another person because they haven’t quite got it. I don’t want to be blinded by my own ‘expertise.’ I want to let others know that it’s okay to feel that you’re in the muck, knee-deep in something, and feeling lost in the fog of information. But over time, you’ll eventually figure it out, and then it will seem less complex, more straightforward. But keep in mind, it wasn’t. And it won’t be for others either.
