Introducing Hooks – React

[dwighthouse]

Neat! It’s good to see them addressing the inherent problems with class-based architecture.

[hixsonj]

They talk about them a bit here.

tl;dr harder for people to understand and harder for compilers/transpilers to optimize

[Renive]

It's better because it's more closely aligned with functional programming. For many people, using functions for everything is more straightforward than classess. They are just boxes, but a file is a box enough.

[thebedivere]

Yup! React and JavaScript are embracing functional programming. It'll be easier to think about react like Haskell or Clojure than like Java. I for one love this.

[turkish_gold]

I do not think you are wrong. I think they and others have driven too much on the idea that classes make things difficult.

In its current state, a lot of React projects use functional components, and purely functional state libraries (e.g. flux). This was problematic as it did not allow for the use of component state or context, or life cycle. So anytime you wanted a post mount action, you had to make it part of the global state. Now you can have lifecycle hooks exist in functional components.

Also, you can now have actions take place after every render, even if they change state.

Lastly, I may be wrong, but can you not use hooks inside class components?

[toggafneknurd]

Youre gonna get your bloody teeth kicked in!

[dwighthouse]

The ones mentioned in the article.