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Reactive programming provides the capability to react to changes in state. You still need to hold that state somewhere, mutate the state from your reactive code, and control the lifetime/scope of that state. Managing state becomes more of a concern with reactive programming, but it also becomes very explicit; this is something that traditional MVC approaches try to hide, to the detriment of anyone trying to understand the data path of your application.



ELI5 why Excel can update all of the sheets from all the different data sources without overloading its user with “state management” thing and React can not?


This talk from Rich Harris should answer most of your Qs:

Rethinking reactivity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao

He goes over the history of spreadsheets, reactive programming, and dunks on react.


I was negative in my deleted comment, but watched the video anyway (I remember skimming through it back in 2019).

It answers my question only tangentially, because it doesn’t touch state management per se. The key point was, what’s the fuss about React SM and why it must be explicit in it. The video basically says that it is a nonsense which may and should be avoided. I agree, and so still don’t get what ggp is talking about.




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