React: Rename `setState` to `queueState`

[prasannavl]

Do you want to request a feature or report a bug?
Bug

What is the current behavior?
The method that's used to en-queue a state change is labelled as setState -- semantically meaning set the state (implicitly usually wrongly understood as, now).

What is the expected behavior?
Perhaps, I'm taking a hard stance on semantics, and will probably get some controversy to this as well, but I believe the current method as setState should actually be treated as a bug in the API naming. I think it should be renamed as enqueueState, or queueState, or pushState, or something on those lines. Perhaps, someone else can come up with a nicer name?

I've seen even people quite experienced in React to make the rookie mistake now and then, of doing setState like it's a synchronous function, and then go bug-hunting. I'm guilty of it as well in deeply nested contexts where its not always obvious. And now with React Fiber, I think it's all the more important to stay relevant.

Let's just bite the bullet, and do a breaking change please. Lifecycle method deprecations are quite of the same magnitude, but it was done - And I for one would think this has to be done. It's not so hard for people to do a Find & Replace - In fact, I'm sure some beginners would even end up fixing some undiscovered errors while doing so, because of a breaking change.

Pros

• All good things.

Cons

• Make some people hold a grudge against me, because they had a function called queueState (or whatever) in their application logic and now they painstakingly have to change that too cursing me, rearranging logic.
• Extremely large organisations like Facebook is going to have to spend some time with unmaintained projects. (I'm still not sure if this is a con, because it would make the code expresses itself more clearly for newcomers who would be less prone to mistakes because of it).
• You have to type 2 extra characters (Strike this if you're sane and use auto-complete).

Which versions of React, and which browser / OS are affected by this issue? Did this work in previous versions of React?
<=17 so far.

[gaearon]

Hey, thanks for writing it up! We plan to move away from this naming in the future but it will be a part of a larger set of new APIs. Given that it's going to happen anyway we don't see the benefit in making this change now, but it's definitely something we'll watch out for in the next set of APIs.