Confusing createAction

[TeoTN]

Hey,

I'd like to point out that for people with little or no former Redux experience, who jump straight into the toolkit, the createAction name is confusing. This function does not in fact create any action - it defines an action creator, which in turn is responsible for creating the action. I'd like to propose renaming createAction to defineActionCreator.

[markerikson]

Agreed that the name isn't 100% descriptive, but it's wayyyy too late to change that at this point.

Besides, most people won't even call createAction themselves - they just use createSlice.

[TeoTN]

No wonder Redux has such attrition at the moment... If one of the main libraries is openly confusing and contributors don't care about that at all

[markerikson]

I'll have to disagree with all of that statement.

RTK's usage is rising steadily (ignore the weird blip at the end, NPM's stats had 0 on Thursday and double on Friday):

https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=%40reduxjs%2Ftoolkit&from=2020-02-01&to=2020-08-02

No one else has raised a complaint about the naming of createAction. Besides, there's plenty of precedent for this name in the ecosystem, such as the redux-actions lib: https://redux-actions.js.org/api/createaction .

Also, renaming stuff would require:

• Releasing a new major version
• Breaking existing user code
• Rewriting large portions of the docs and tutorials

All for no real meaningful benefit to the end user, and as I said, it's an API that most users won't even call themselves in practice.

I care deeply about our userbase. But, being a maintainer means weighing lots of different concerns: naming, API design, existing users, and much more.

As an example, see the multiple 250+ comment issue threads on how we designed the React-Redux hooks API:

• Discussion: Potential hooks API design react-redux#1179
• Feedback: React-Redux v7 hooks alpha react-redux#1252

I'm not going to publish a breaking change and force our users to rewrite their code, for a name change that I don't even feel is an actual improvement, and that has no further evidence that this is actually a problem for our users.

[phryneas]

No wonder Redux has such attrition at the moment... If one of the main libraries is openly confusing and contributors don't care about that at all

Now go to the React repository and suggest they change they rename one of the core APIs. Go to TC39 and request that a JavaScript API is should be renamed. Because there is a more fitting name for it.
Even if you were right and there were a better name (personally, my take is that createActionCreator would be more fitting, but also too long and most developers would prefer createAction as a consequence), you would get the same answer: "it's too late for that".
And in both cases, it would be that answer because the maintainers are responsible.

RTK was in a public pre-release state for over a year. That feedback would have been possbile then. By now, it's in production for almost a year. It has a userbase. Numerous tutorials have been written on it.

It's not worth breaking something like that just to "be more precise". Guess what? There's a documentation.
I sincerely hope that people read the documentation for any package instead of guessing from the method names what arguments and return values a random method in there would have and how it should be used.