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Comment by paveldedik | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on a lightweight framework called Ludic that focuses on web development using Python, htmx.org, and a somewhat React-like component approach. It leverages Starlette for performance and the latest Python 3.12 typing features.

Interested in feedback!

* Docs: https://ludic.readthedocs.io/ * Code: https://github.com/paveldedik/ludic/ * Examples: https://github.com/paveldedik/ludic/tree/main/examples

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By React-like component approach, do you mean using functions instead of templating language?

I think it is somewhat similar to React, for example, you can create a Link component like you can see in the README.md

Now you can use it in f-strings, and well, other components.

The idea from the beginning was to integrate it with htmx.org, so to me, it feels kind of similar when you are writing endpoints using these "components".

But I understand why you are raising this question, I also didn't know how to name it, and React is a completely different framework. I didn't know how to describe the framework in just a few sentences but wanted to somehow. I might change the description at some point.

I still don't know how useful the framework is, I am playing around with it and I like it. Who knows what other people think, though.

// edit - code block don't work here, removed code sample.

Is there any chance you are considering moving towards structured data as HTML, as in SXML, instead of putting things into fstrings?

Well, I would like it if the solution supported standard Python typing. Here I can create a "component" that expects a specific type of the first child and a specific type of the second child. I would probably have to use a separate tool for some kind of type-checking the SXML or something.

BTW in Rust, you can create macros, that is something I like a lot as you can see in yew framework - https://yew.rs/docs/getting-started/build-a-sample-app#updat... - you can write HTML which probably are typed. Python doesn't have anything like that, I don't know about any other way to do this.

// edit typo

Whether compile time guarantees or not, even having HTML elements as objects would be better than putting them into the f-strings. With objects we could probably pattern match on then and traverse the tree, instead of having to rely on other tooling or even regex to search for things inside an f-string.

FWIW, my reaction to the Link example was pretty much "Why do I have to build this, why isn't such a basic thing that any project would want not batteries-included?". Not the greatest first impression.

But `a` is included. You don't have to build a `Link` component. If you want to stylize your links in consistently across your page, you can build your own Link.

The example does nothing other than renaming `href` to `to` and adding a style.

How should the framework know which styles you want to apply to a link?

I think the example explains the component-driven design of the library well.

How would you feel if the first example in, say, a ruby tutorial, was how to redefine the ‘+’ operator to use a different symbol?

It’s somewhere between pointless and confusing to me, and isn’t illustrative of why one would want to use components, or what a competent even is.

Interestingly, the second example on the official Ruby "About" page is almost exactly that: it defines .plus to be an alias of .+, and demonstrates how it might be used.

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/about/

As a web developer (and therefore, I imagine, part of the target demographic for this sort of tool), I personally find this component example very useful. Components are very powerful, but most existing Python templating languages make it difficult or overly verbose to use them to their full extent. This is a really good demonstration of how I can write simple presentational components and use them with server-rendered HTMX. That shows off one of the main things I would want to do with this sort of framework.

So from that perspective, this is very much the perfect sort of example.

That's a totally different presentation though. The ludic home page never mentions that there is an existing function/data type! It just goes straight into the definition of Link without giving any context to someone who doesn't know what htmx is. There is nothing to tell a naive reader that this isn't how you'd do this in a production app.

I see where you’re coming from. What you are describing is the exact feeling I’m getting whenever I’m reading the man pages of older R packages.

But this might also mean that one is not the target audience in this case…

Thank you for the feedback, I need to improve the home page a lot. I thought I should make it as brief as possible so that people don't need to read long essays to quickly understand what it is about. But at the same time, presenting all the necessary information in a short text seems hard.

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