midrus

> SPA or hybrid rendering is just plain better,

It is not for your end users, just for the developers building it because it has a better dev experience. As a proof of this try most sites out there which are built as an SPA vs the ones built with more traditional approaches.

Also, building SPAs is incredibly more difficult and time consuming, that's why most of them work like shit.

Github, Hey, and so many others are examples of Rails applications with complex interactions. Server templates and partials rendering doesn't mean "I reload the page on every click and can't write any javascript because I only do ruby". You have tools for doing dynamic html too, just not your usual redux/rxjs/thunk/observable/typesafeactions stuff.

Agree that Django is a backend framework, but Rails is not, you can certainly do frontend in Rails. Just not SPAs, but you need a more open mindset for understanding how it is intended to be used.

Of course, if you are building Google Docs or Maps then you're probably better with a SPA framework. But not for 90% of applications out there which are just CRUD apps.

Wait until you see JavaScript written by Java programmers.

It had "Java" in the name.... right??? right!!??

This is crazy. Plus all components are now singletons. Plus you won't be able to use almost any 3rd party hook. Plus probably breaks devtools, linters, and more.

What about just using Vue or Svelte if you don't like the way React works and/or is expected to be used?

Looking just at the "syntax" to discard or like something is very naive in my opinion.

Thinks such as the performance, the reactivity model, the "gotchas", the ecosystem, the libraries, the tooling, etc are far, far, far more important than "I like IFs done this way".

This is the same thing as when people discard Tailwind because "I don't like reading that many classes". There's so much more behind it to like or dislike it.

It is not an "HN thing". These machines are damn fast in day to day use. Absolutely zero heat, zero usage of fans and incredible battery life too. I see a lot of hype and fanboys around here regarding certain techs, but these machines are objectively on a whole different league.

I suppose it depends on what you subscribe to.

> I'm driving or walking or cooking or cleaning.

> It's noise that minimally engages

What's a better alternative? Listen to the vacuum cleaner? to the other's cars engines? To the top 10 reggaeton mix?

I use every single "non thinking" activity I do (like driving, cleaning, walking outside, etc) to listen to things that really interest me, from news about the tech industry, to web dev subjects I'm interested on, to astrophysics and general science divulgation, etc.

The amount of stuff I've learnt and the entertainment provided is invaluable to me, and just using time otherwise I'd be just hating my life for being stuck in a traffic jam.

Yeah, scrum masters. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse.

You seem to have misunderstood everything. Engineers where the ones pushing for it, that's why they ended up building surrounding services in python3.

Transitioning big, heavily used, daily changed by thousands of engineers codebases is not easy.

Do not make it look like just people is incompetent. It is a big financial, management and engineering effort.

Maybe you're not understanding the scale of these things.

I'm talking about many years ago (6 more or less).

And this company has a HUGE codebase. It has its managements problems too, but the situation I'm talking about didn't make it any easier.

I stopped using python long ago, out of the frustration with the breakage caused in the ecosystem first due to the 2/3 transition, and then by splitting again the ecosystem with all the async stuff they introduced, when having instead gone the way of gevent would have ended up in something like this.

The company I was at the time tried really hard to move to python 3. It was a huge codebase with thousands of engineers. After more than a year of work they cancelled the project and said they'll never upgrade to python 3, and instead started writing smaller "microservices" around the core product just to calm engineers anxiety to use python3. Now Django is suffering kind of the same problem with all the async stuff being bolted on, adding a lot of gotchas and side effects and incompatibilities around every corner. It is a mess.

I left that company and I will never use python again.

I love how Ruby seems to care about the ecosystem, and both ruby and rails keep innovating and providing awesome full stack solutions.

Wohaa!! I had one of those. Those were my first few years with computers and I was just learning with a friend of mine how to build and tune them to support better Doom, Quake and all the games we were playing at the time. I think this stuff was the ignition of my profession.

So many good memories. I feel old :-s.

Give a try to Unpoly[1].

I really, really, really love it and feel like this is what 90% of projects need, and maybe the remaining 10% are the ones that need a full frontend framework.

Unpoly augments HTML in a declarative way, it comes with support for navigation, modals, sidebars, popups, forms, validation, etc out of the box and allows you to also add custom behavior if that's not enough. It is backend agnostic so you don't need any special integration in your backend other than it being able to spit out plain old html. It is very "full stack" in the sense you won't need much more (think of it as the non-Rails stimulus + turbo + hotwire +....). Unless you're using Rails and Hotwire, I think Unpoly is the best alternative while keeping things sane.

I work full time as a frontend developer, now with Vue and previously with React. Believe me, in most of the cases the added complexity doesn't make any sense at all.

[1] https://unpoly.com/

But why do we need a new rails? That's what I don't get. Just because we want to use JavaScript?

I don't think 100s of engineers working on a massive next.js application would be any easier. At scale everything is complex.

Best release ever

I'm going to be downvoted to hell for this... but the more I see the level of complexity and amount of engineering going into this, the more I miss Rails and how simple things are there, given most of us are just building CRUD apps anyways.

Google App Engine?

Bad news for you: as apps grow bigger, they become complex and difficult to maintain in every single platform or language.

Worked for a company that made extensive use of elixir. It was a disaster, not due to the technical stuff, but because of every other aspect of a technology choice:

- Near impossible to hire experienced people - We had to write from scratch a lot of things that are "free" with rails/django/etc - The paradigm change takes time to learn and get it right - Some people were happy to learn it, others didn't want because they knew they wouldn't use it ever again - Many missing libraries in the ecosystem. Some libraries are poorly implemented or abandoned. - Googling for problems wasn't easy, there aren't as many answers out there as you can have for Rails, Django, etc...

But yes, the Erlang VM is awesome, can't disagree with that.

Given how bad it works, I bet it runs a kubernetes cluster with all 100s of microservices inside my browser.

Or even better, provide a top level configuration option, like:

ReactDOM.render(element, document.getElementById('root'), {memo: true});

Just dreaming...

This is great. And great explanation of the reasonings.

I wonder why React doesn't provide a configuration/flag/option to just do this by default if anybody wants to.

I like Unpoly[1] a lot. Seems like the perfect companion for django template based projects. It's like htmx but with more features.

https://unpoly.com/

> Then all that extra complexity starts sucking more when you figure out that an old server-rendering framework would work just fine for the app you are developing, it didn’t have to be a SPA in the first place. But React was chosen just because it’s the cool modern framework.

I'm sad I cannot upvote this more than once.

I'm an extremely happy Brave user since last year, and my default search service is duckduckgo. Not missing neither chrome nor google search.

To me right now it is the uncertainty of all the things that maybe could go wrong with nuclear power vs the certainty of a global collapse.

Well, it's not ideal but what is the alternative? To me it is either nuclear or watch how the next generations are going to be the last ones, because there is no other solution (or improvement at least) at sight right now.

I love the fact that rails also provides a solution/opinion to the frontend part. Django sounds like nowadays can only be used for backend.