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React Today and Tomorrow and 90% Cleaner React With Hooks

React Conf
Talks
YouTube
4 HN users recommended this talk4 months2019–2025 score 4.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

It is the canonical introduction to hooks, given by the people who built them, and HN uses it to answer questions about why hooks exist.

The first three talks from React Conf 2018, by Sophie Alpert, Dan Abramov and Ryan Florence. They introduce React Hooks and explain the problems with classes that hooks solve.

“It's absolutely worth the watch, even if you're somewhat familiar with hooks.” (HN, 2019)

1 strong recommendations · 3 recommendations · 1 citations · Talks · intermediate · partly dated

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@kybishop Sep 2019 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Frustrations with React Hooks
Have you seen the ReactConf talk on hooks? [1] It's absolutely worth the watch, even if you're somewhat familiar with hooks. They go through the pitfalls of class-based components and how hooks solve them. It more-or-less boils down to: 1. class-based components force your lifecycle logic to live in disparate locations. 2. Class-based hooks are obtuse with hidden gotchas whereas pure functions tell you exactly what they're doing. 3. A whole class of unergenomic solutions disappears when you use hooks. [1] [this video]
Explains class pitfalls and how hooks solve them.
@jasongi Sep 2022 Recommends
on HN thread React I love you, but you're bringing me down
Read more
You aren’t the only person, I’ve certainly heard it before. But I’m yet to hear a convincing rebuttal to Mixins Considered Harmful [1], the hooks talk [2] or the Motivation section [3] on the announcement. The arguments I’ve heard is that it is “cleaner”, “more understandable” or the OO style is preferred. Some developers feel uncomfortable with hook magic because it introduces a more niche programming concept than OO (e.g stateful functions). I don’t find these arguments compelling. What the React team managed to do was reproduce the same functionality as class components while decreasing the footguns associated with them. 1. [link] 2. [this video] 3. [link]
Rebuttal-worthy case for hooks over classes.
@AndrewOMartin Jan 2024 Recommends
on HN thread Ask HN: Learn React or Vue?
Just watch the video from ReactConf 2018 where hooks are introduced (by the dude who built them). You can play along at home quite easily by getting started either with "npx create-react-app myApp" or a simple html file with one script tag to download react from a CDN and one script tag for your code. Talk: [this video] By the end of the talk you'll probably be leaning towards "this sounds cool, I'd like to play around with it" or "that sounds like cursed incantations for the damned".
Introduces hooks by their creator, easy to follow along.
@jfcisco Apr 2025 Recommends
on HN thread Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button
Hooks require less boilerplate to set up and reuse stateful logic across components If you havent watched it yet, the talk that introduced hooks explains much better than I can: [this video]
Talk that introduced hooks, explains reuse of stateful logic.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@azimuth11 May 2019 Cites it
on HN thread Angular v8.0
While you wouldn't want to leave "console.log" in your code in production, you can use them in function components just like a classes' render methods. A better example (from the video "React Today and Tomorrow and 90% Cleaner React With Hooks" from October[1]) is something along the lines of updating document.title = `${some} Page` or possibly calling an API. [1]: [this video]
Hooks examples like updating document.title.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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