Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

My analogy for you is a house that was built 6 inches to the right of where it should be. It's almost perfectly good. You can live in it. But there are these niggling things wrong. They will always be wrong. Over time, enough people say "hey if we just do this work, get this done, we can move the house". So finally some people actually do it - they move the house, brick by brick, 6 inches to the left. And hence end up with Webpack and npm and 1gb of node_modules etc etc. And the house is now 6 inches to the left. To many it looks identical to how it did before. But for those to whom it really matters - people who's quality of life depends a lot on exactly where the house is - it is a massive difference.

So many small things are just now better - aligned with what we really needed to start with. Whether it's the automatic reactive updating dev server, the fact I can embed CSS directly with my component and have it scoped there, or that I can use properly DRY CSS, or that I can unit test my code separate to the DOM, that I can build my pages in a truly "functional" way such that they are free from complex state bugs ... all these things are small ... but big.

Probably the single biggest thing in my own experience - and that the SPA naysayers or php/flask/ruby commenters miss, the ability to work on front end while the browser updates automatically, without a full page reload, and while maintaining state (for example, complex form fills), including layout/style changes (which are automatically scoped and vendor prefixed for you) is the single greatest time saver and ergonomic feature that at least for me, makes React + webpack + all the things they’re complaining about worth it over any caveats and/or benefits of “X instead.”

Full page reloads seem like a red herring to me here. There doesn't seem to be a difference in feasibility of achieving these things between having and not having them.

And to take this analogy further, adding HTMX to a traditional web framework or switching to Phoenix LiveView is like jacking up the whole house and moving it to a better spot in an afternoon, which is what my coworker’s family did to their first home the week they bought it after moving to the US. If you don’t know it can’t be done…

Phoenix Liveview is far more similar to a python or ruby app. You just have a websocket keeping things synced perfectly and maintaining state.

It’s awesome, yes, but it’s quite orthogonal to the nodejs/npm way of doing things. It’s far better.

I'm a big fan. :) I think many people would be happier making 'real-time' apps with the approach than with a messy JS stack.

> which is what my coworker’s family did to their first home the week they bought it after moving to the US

Tangential to this thread but... why? I'm asking from a country where that is not a done thing, and where heave and shrinkage under foundations cause enough problems without even thinking of moving them.

They were Polish immigrants. I know part of the work involved the foundation but not much more. Obviously no time to expand a basement or crawlspace, if there was one. It sounds insane to me, too, but I'm the kind of person who waffles over which foundation engineering firm to call just to get an estimate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com