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Comment by candyman | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see something like this. I'm an old computer science guy and would love to write software again. I can write plenty of functionality in Python but I don't really want to learn all the JS stuff. I just don't like it. If I could abstract away the details it would be a big help. I'm not going to build anything that requires scale or commercial performance so I can afford to compromise versus the "purity" of having your own stack.

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> ...I'm an old computer science guy and would love to write software again. I can write plenty of functionality in Python but I don't really want to learn all the JS stuff...

Back in early 2000s, i used to be more of a front-end dev...but over the years of being more of a manager (or PM or product manager) i stepped away from daily development...So, you know, I lost my touch. But a few years ago when i tried to dip back into things again, i got turned off from needing to "learn all the JS stuff". It feels all so bloated and so much work for what to me seems minimal gain. Nowadays, i much prefer back-end development (not that iots easy, but maybe it just clicks more for me without so much JS stuff)...so when i see frameworks like this one, i get more interested.

Check out htmx.

Thanks for this recommendation! I had actually already added htmx to my "need to research/review" list of bookmarks... since it kept coming up in HN comments so often. Now, i guess i can move it up a tad in priority.

I'm in exactly the same boat. Ive managed to keep inntouch with core tools on the backend, but frontend has just withered on the vine, so to speak. Learning all the JS stuff is just too hard when combined with back end, data, auth, layout, display, responsive, etc.

> ...when combined with back end, data, auth, layout, display, responsive, etc...

Exactly! Glad to hear I'm not alone in that boat! :-)

Room for another one on that boat? : -)

Permission to come aboard?

Then you might like Rails 7 which defaults to Hotwire for a minimal-JS front-end.

In simple terms, what does Hotwire mean / provide?

Hotwire allows you to handle front-end page/view updates and state from the server instead of relying on an SPA framework. Rails sends the minimal amount of JS to update the page without a full reload and for many use cases it's all you need. When you click a link configured with Hotwire turbolinks intercepts the call, fetches the new content from Rails and strips out everything except the body tag and its contents then uses that, with a sprinkling of JS, to update the page/view.

That's sounds pretty good, actually.

Try Svelte

What makes Svelte easier than other approaches?

Have you tried Django? https://www.djangoproject.com/

In my experience using Django for my webapps hasn't meant I can avoid HTML and javascript. Writing templates is writing HTML, and any relatively fancy UI including charting etc. requires using javascript

I built a recent Django site that only used JS for analytics and to implement the close button on a modal. You can do charting using server side rendered images pretty easily, especially as SVGs (although I concede, dynamic charts client side are a better UI). CSS is harder to escape if you want things to look fancy.

Given the update latency pynecone has, I can't imagine a charting library would work well.

well, I am not sure how you can build a webapp by avoiding HTML, JS and CSS.

It could be a nice option for small projects! The companies where I saw Django in production had terrible issues. Last.fm is one of them, I can't speak directly about the other one (aerospace). Django is good for a proof of concept but once you hit real-world requirements or your developers (inevitably unaware of the nuances of Django) start adding code and exceptions, it completely breaks down. Django was a good idea back when PHP was the only way to make "interactive" pages. Nowadays -for big/real projects- is just asking for trouble.

Long time ago -for a personal project- I used CherryPy, which is simpler and easy to learn. I don't know where it stands today, but it's another option.

  > Last.fm is one of them

Can you talk a little bit more about this? What kind of issues does Last.fm have that is related to or caused by Django?

I'll try! Last.fm started many years ago, in the early '00s (pretty much like Django!). They decided to use Django to serve their website and API. As the years went by, some issues and limitations started to show up: the API has several quirks they can't fix, the frontend -even after the redesign- is slow, and interactions feel clunky and outdated (like early AJAX attempts).

The API can't be easily modified -and sometimes XML responses have info JSON don't-, the website is stuck on being served through the framework instead of relying on a modern API... They even have an "old" and "new" database for albums, so when you query some of the albums through the API they come back with no tracks because the API is in the old codebase. It's a mess. And from my experience with Django, it feels a lot like the difficulties we had trying to scale and improve our existing code. It's not that you can't do things: it's just that Django isn't agile enough to adapt. You end up adapting to Django and its -beautiful and magical- ways.

Of course we could blame it on poor design choices, lack of Django knowledge or just call it technical debt... but I believe the framework is the major culprit.

For context: I haven't worked for last.fm, but I manage a third-party client (Open Scrobbler). I've been using their API for more than five years now, had interactions with their devs, read many replies in the API support forum and even tried to find undocumented endpoints that could help me (during this time I found some old profiles and test pages where you can even see screenshots of Django logs!).

What you described would have happened with any other framework available at that time when you make poor design choices. I don't see anything django specific there

> but I believe the framework is the major culprit.

Yet somehow the decades long popularity of Django, it's widespread usage and presumably many successful real-world deployments doesn't make you question your own belief?

Yeah, Django is a nice option for small proof of concepts like Instagram.

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