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Comment by peterhunt | Hacker News Reader

> Avoid working with over-engineered frameworks without sacrificing a great interactive experience

This is a pretty lame claim seeing as text fields are busted in Hamlet. [1]

This is another example of a "lightweight" library that hasn't hit any of the hard problems yet. It's fine if you make this your personal project to learn from, but trying to convince people to bet their projects on unproven technology is pretty disingenuous.

[1] Inserting characters does not work in the second example at http://hamlet.coffee/garden/

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All of those examples work for me with Chrome 35.

One thing I would love on HN is the reluctance to say something is "lame" because one example doesn't work for one person on one browser. Instead of being dismissive, why not be constructive? Or if you can't even do that, just don't post?

If you look at my posting history you'll see that I tend to agree with your sentiment. Too much negativity on HN and I combat it where I can.

But "lightweight" JS fetishism at the expense of correctness (and the arrogance that comes with it!) is an epidemic in the frontend web business today. I think it's important to highlight this when it happens so we can stop making crappy web apps and start to actually deliver reasonable experiences when compared to native.

Also here is a video of the bug: http://www.petehunt.net/hamlet.mov

Hi Pete,

I can't get the video to work on my machine.

When opening it with the default video player I get:

    An error occurred
    This file contains no playable streams.

System info:

    ♥ uname -a
    Linux yolobookjr 3.8.0-35-generic #50-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 3 01:24:59 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Looks like a lot of software still has room to improve. :)

Thanks for your video reproducing the bug. We'll get on it.

We don't expect to have something as polished as React yet. Early feedback is all we can hope for so we can iterate on what we believe is an innovative approach to a problem that many devs have.

To be clear I'm not at all against what you guys are doing. It's more about the messaging than anything else -- there are plenty of open-source projects that this could be said about, but the messaging is a lot less aggro than what I saw on Hamlet.

I do see what you mean about the messaging and I understand how you could feel that way.

I apologize if it's a little aggressive, it's not our intent to belittle the work of others. We'll try to find the most constructive ways to express the tradeoffs between tools as we continue to refine our project and message.

Thanks again for the feedback, sorry if I come off as an ass sometimes.

I see the bug too on Chrome 35 on a Mac.

That said, and with lots of respect for your work on React Pete, and also acknowledging that React is probably the simplest of the big frameworks, the love of minimalism and simplicity comes from a very real need and attempts to fulfill that need shouldn't be dismissed as toy projects. From what I can tell, Mithril, for example, is anything but that.

I think people really really like being able to jump into something that can be useful and played with based on a few examples, and to model things with POJOs. I agree correctness shouldn't be sacrificed, but it doesn't have to be.

Totally agree. If someone comes up with a simpler way to do it and proves it out on a few projects of real complexity, then I think it's great.

My complaint is you see a lot of upstart projects pulling mindshare when the reason they're simple is either a matter of personal preference or a lack of essential complexity. Hamlet was an easy target because cursor position management is a great example of essential complexity and they made pretty aggro claims on their site about how over-engineered everything else is.

To clarify: try inserting characters at the beginning of the string. It causes the caret to jump to the end.

Which string are you talking about? Also, which OS/browser are you using?

On http://hamlet.coffee/garden/ on the "dependent functions" live demo area, change the word "Prince" to the word "Prance" by putting the caret after "i", pressing backspace, then pressing "a". Expected output: "Prance". Actual output: "Prncea". Chrome 35.0.1916.153.

I haven't come across broken text fields while testing the site with Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE9+, and Mobile Safari.

Could you let me know which browser and version you're using so I can get to the bottom of the problem?

A technology becomes proven through use.

What browser and OS are you using? The examples have worked in our testing environments of Chrome, FF, IE9+, Safari, and Opera.

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