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Comment by patientplatypus | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to downplay the library, but how hard is Javascript/HTML for the majority of python programmers? You might not make the most beautiful websites, but you can make a functional website if what you're displaying is primarily data to users because you're doing big data/AI and so forth and not setting up a consumer facing marketing platform. What's the use case here?

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It's a big mental hurdle.

I don't really care about HTML/CSS/JS. I really don't care about React. But the four of those form this gigantic cottage industry of tribal knowledge that requires so much fiddling. In short, I don't want to be a webdev.

I just want to use the browser as a dumb display device and a software delivery mechanism. I want the UI to be as simple as possible until I start getting traction, then I'll get someone to add some paint to make it passable.

The dream is a VB-like product that lets me focus on creating features, not worrying about technical inanities like getting CORS configured right for the 5000th time.

I hear your sentiment. As a backend / ML guy who tried to ship projects as a solo dev: I do understand JS/HTML. I understand the programming model of web and still build things the conventional way: templating on server which returns HTML. But lot of time still goes in CSS, to get things exactly working the way we want.

The catch is trying to keep up with Javascript complexity. Javascript/react world is entirely different beast. Spent some time understanding class based React. But then things moved to hooks. I sort of started grokking hooks. But now there is new clamour (not yet mainstream) about something new like server side components or signals or hydration or what not. Same is the case with Svelte. I tried the basic tutorials, understood it. But Svelte kit started talking about 100 different ideas about server pre-rendering components etc. I thought why bother? Jinja2 templating and bit of inline JS looked a better option.

Python devs want to stick to Python because it is still second best language to get something out there, quickly. Except for UI. Currently I'm looking into using HTMX as much as possible. If this thing solves for UI side of it then I'll definitely give it a try.

I don't think Jacascript/HTML is the hurdle - for me it's all of the tooling around the ecosystem that makes me want to avoid it. That said, these types of tools have been a good entry point into front-end work, and I'm now at a point where building directly in JS makes more sense.

One thing that is a huge win for the work I am doing - using Dash, I'm able to prototype an informal API and build the visualisations in a single step, which is great when it's unclear what is going to be useful. Long-term it definitely makes maintenance harder, and I think that's where there is a gap in the ecosystem - ideally I want to eject the front-end and convert the API to something more formal to hand off to a real front-end developer.

Writing Javascript and HTML isn't the hard part. It's packaging and deploying it that is a whole new thing to learn where nothing you know from the past applies.

> I don't want to downplay the library, but how hard is Javascript/HTML for the majority of python programmers?

Not easy, esp. when you throw in CSS and the build systems

As someone who is good at Python but knows nearly nothing about javascript:

Very hard. Of course I can just write everything into a big js file, but if you want to structure things, it's hard. You have to learn all about this NPM and NODE stuff, learn how to refresh and debug things.

And if you make the tiniest mistake, this thing will not crash with proper error messages like python.

Definitely understand where you coming from, but I think there are a lot of engineers and data scientists who don't agree or don't have the time/drive to learn frontend technologies.

Not wanting to deal with Javascript the language [1], maybe?

[1]: https://javascriptwtf.com/

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