Hacker News Reader

Comment by jFriedensreich | Hacker News Reader

I thought about carbon too, but unfortunately it gives me extreme IBM cloud ptsd. The number of bad associations products building on that design system have to start with is probably not worth the time savings.

View on HN

Palantir's Blueprint UI toolkit might scratch the same itch if you're looking to build very functional, dense UIs: https://blueprintjs.com/docs/

Not even close to the IBM one. Think of icons/pictograms or animations, you can have use a library for that but you'll have to do your own custom styling to match it with your theme. Carbon is the most encompassing one that comes with lots of things you might need that are already integrated in style and patterns with the core framework.

I am not sure there is that many people (beside IBM) that are using it. In fact, they have a pretty much dead Discord channel with very few users. My only explanation was either people didn't like the very corporate style or that it had a steep initial cost to implement.

> but unfortunately it gives me extreme IBM cloud ptsd

Sure. It did give me some of that PTSD but then every UI framework I struggled with had lacking that gave me severe headaches. At some point I realized that Carbon is not that bad after all.

I brought it to production and had to fork some packages due to incomplete APIs, and there was a lot of glue code and writing custom components because the existing ones didn't meet my needs. It looks great but in the end it took more of a backseat than I'd have wished. But under the hood, the architecture of the current major version is great. Clean, modern best practices, especially regarding styling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com