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jacobsenscottlast Thursday at 3:55 PM1 replyview on HN

I haven't used htmx, but I've given turbo a fair shake. I've only worked on server side rendered apps for my whole career, and they are generally they way to go. But just like react, or anything else, you throw enough engineers at it and it becomes a mess. But also you'll only find a handful of engineers who understand it compared to react, so that makes it worse. I think the bottom line is creating web UI is just as unsolved today as it was 20+ years ago, and nobody can make any headway - it suggests the fundamentals are totally wrong - after all - this isn't what http and html were even built for.

Given sufficient time and money (20+ years, and billions (trillions?) of dollars - which is what we've thrown at web apps) you could build GUI apps using the IRC protocol, but it will never work well.

LLM generated code probably tips the scales toward using react though. You can have the bots churn through all that boiler plate, it won't be any worse than what human react devs write, and keep the bots away from your mission critical code because it isn't all munged together like in a SSR app.


Replies

SoftTalkerlast Thursday at 6:21 PM

> this isn't what http and html were even built for

Ding! Ding! You win the prize. Absolutely correct.