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Comment by OhMeadhbh | Hacker News Reader

Meh. Different technologies aren't inherently better or worse than other technologies. They're better or worse for a specific set of circumstances. What I hear Karthikeyan saying is they don't need features ReactJS offers.

Like for instance... Apple Integer BASIC was a GREAT technology if all you had was an Apple ][ with 16k of RAM and were writing programs that interacted with a single user via the keyboard and monitor. If you have an array of hosts serving a web app and it's persistence tier up in someone else's datacenter, Apple Integer BASIC would not be my first choice.

But HTMX with it's conflation of presentation and business logic would also not be my first choice.

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> Different technologies aren't inherently better or worse than other technologies.

That's a rather wild interpretation (to put it midly).

You have compared things on subjective terms; i.e. about BASIC being better on a limited old Apple. But that's not the same as how some technologies are objectively better or worse than others.

I'd have understood if you were comparing things on the measure of engineering tradeoffs - but instead you speak in absolutes about the 'betterness' of a technology that you do not prefer, over one known to be slow and bloated (ReactJS). That seems questionable.

ReactJS is objectively bad for an Apple ][ with 16kb.

Also, there's nothing in the statement "different technologies aren't inherently better or worse than other technologies" which requires it be interpreted in isolation or to require it to be interpreted subjectively (or objectively.)

Sometimes we have to deal with the ambiguity of natural language.

> But HTMX with it's conflation of presentation and business logic would also not be my first choice.

Have you seen React??

Htmx is just html attributes... that's it. If you want to mix things in your controllers, go ahead. But in my humble experience, the only way to write React components is to mix logic with presentation.

Nah, the main use case for react is making html that's so shitty and convulated that you can't write an ad blocker that works for it. If that's your goal it's probably a good choice.

I'm only half joking here, as that does seem to be one of the main reasons Facebook uses it. Another factor is that they write their backend in php.

Less tongue in cheek, why do you think that HTMX mixes presentation and business logic? Are you imagining we put business logic in the templates?

> Another factor is that they write their backend in php.

Hack is the language, not PHP.

But if you're looking for PHP + HTMX + components with no js ... I built a framework for it: https://framework.getswytch.com/

Ah yes, we are still in 2023 and we are still flaming any PHP user because PHP is so 2001.

I believe we are flaming PHP users because people remember the state of PHP from 2001. It was a great language for generating HTML to put around a MySQL query. And has advanced from that. But people still remember it for what it lacks: Websocket support, sub-1-secod timers, namespace management, consistent class method call semantics, etc.

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