First Impressions: Redux/Flow

I am trying to write more and more quickly... so this is just a few quick thoughts from learning flow and redux right now for a new project I just switched to at work.

First, I love the theoretical idea of redux. It’s great and founded on excellent CS principles.

Second, I am not a fan of types in my untyped languages.

Those things said I think the developer ergonomics of Flow and Redux are pretty awful at first glance. I think this means a couple of things. The first being that Redux is the new backbone. It’s awesome and has some really good ideas, but because the developer ergonomics aren’t very good it is going to get supplanted as the favored child of the JS world.

The main thing that makes me say this is just the immense amount of boilerplate that exists in it. Reducers get huge. Actions aren’t too bad but still have a lot of boilerplate.

The other thing that this says to me is that there is a huge opportunity for some good developer tools to make that boilerplate easier to manage. It all kind of looks the same, it all follows a set structure. That means that it could be automated. Just a thought.

This also means that we could be about to swing back hard towards vue.js which is more like Angular 1 in its developer ergonomics.

I hope not... and I also hope that I am proven wrong about the development experience with redux and flow. Only time will tell :-)

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