Confession to make.

I'd like to see a proper discussion around React.js and WordPress for the future. I like the premise of React.js as a tech in isolation, but I'm not sure how I feel about it being packed with the many libraries already present and loading on many pages in WP, such as underscore.js, backbone and jquery.

There's too much overlap and it imparts a lot of requirements on people wanting to work with. Also, React still is a FB thing (the big corp who's business is selling our private life to businesses) with a license that isn't a compatible as you would like. I mean, the license works I guess, but it doesn't make you feel warm and fuzzy inside either.

I also feel like, despite that I love JS, we may be undervaluing the PHP side of things and letting the sparkly side of new tech steer us for reasons that have nothing to do with end-user experience and more to do with scratching developer's itches and for the sake of appearances.

And I say that as a plugin dev that is continually thinking "I should JS all the things".

I don't think the notion that everything should shift to JS should go as unchallenged as it is currently. Especially now that PHP is in better shape than ever and servers are generally really fast, the business case for overengineering stuff on the clientside isn't as compelling as it might feel.

I look at the Node.js ecosystem and for as much cool things about it, there are so many annoying things. Few hosting companies offer an easy node.js server setup, that could take years.

Working with hundreds of javascript files is to me much more daunting and fragile feeling. If you want to start a React project, you have to set up a pretty complicated environment and configure build steps and processes.

You have to make tons of choices (do I submit to using JSX? What other libs do I add on like flux? etc etc) and the choices are rarely that clear to make, especially considering how fast things move. As a developer, I hate that the choices consume so much time in my head before even writing a line of code and it nevers leave me with the feeling that it was the best one.

When coding in pure php, I don't have to worry about build steps. I don't have to worry about how I can get pieces of code from different modules to work together. Things just work out of the box.

You end up with many dozens of different js modules doing different things for which updated packages appear frequently or infrequently that may or may not be compatible.

And then when you add the difficulty of other plugins adding their own libraries to the mix.

There's also something interesting about tinkering with PHP scripts compared to tinkering with JS. If you, say, work in a React.js style, you can't then start tinkering with the logic in a non-react way, I mean you can, but it will clash in a bigger way. With php code, no matter how it is coded, actions and filters let you pretty much code in 'your' way and still end up with something that works OK.

We are also continuing the raise the barrier to entry for people interested in getting into coding. There is so much implicit knowledge required to work with both sophisticated JS, php, html, css and git.

Especially when you consider that you now often need to setup a detailed environment just to get started, as well as build steps to package everything up again. That's a huge ask for people getting started. I'm fearful that we are making things increasingly difficult when we add more tech like React.js.

I can't fight the feeling that something is amiss when I'm not a 100% excited about JS taking over an increasing role, when I actually like WordPress and I like coding in javascript a lot.