> Another practical reason not to use htmx is that there are, rounding off, zero htmx jobs.
> I just did a search for htmx jobs on indeed and found a grand total of two: one at Microsoft and one at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
> A search for “react”, on the other hand, gives 13,758 jobs.
> Seriously, developer, which of these two technologies do you want to hitch your career to?
I do not advocated for htmx; but this take is so bad!
Resume-driven development should not be a thing. If you are a professional developer, building a product for a user, your primary concern should not be the job market for when you quit the company you are working for, but rather making the best product possible for the user within the context of the current company. And if the product is such that it does not call for react, or some other javascript-rich client, then you shouldn't use it however many react jobs there may be on Indeed.
The evidence is so damning that htmx.org even opted to host it. That's not all- the author of the document is the one who developed HTMX!
(In all seriousness, this entire article is facetious and is highlighting the strengths of HTMX. They are not sincerely advocating for 'resume driven development'.)
Right :-) That article did read as satire; but then, it is hard to tell what is satire anymore. I can hear people say the things he catalogues in the article; and I might agree with some of them, like the pollution of the window namespace, or the ancient syntax if this is indeed the case.
At this point, web design 'ecosystems' are essentially money whirlpools. They're complex, so they require programmers skilled in using them, who in turn make more sites which need more programmers, and so on, and the network effect takes over and cements this feedback loop in the structure of the jobs market.
And the frameworks are churned continuously and are also bug-ridden nightmares, so that continuous development and support is needed to keep websites functioning and secure.
Any reduction in framework complexity threatens the whole edifice.
I think the number of job postings is pretty related to factors that I do consider valid when selecting a piece of technology (eg: language, framework, etc):
- How easy is it to hire people with experience in this?
- Relatedly, how easy will it be for the org to maintain this software after I (or the original team) leaves?
> How easy is it to hire people with experience in this?
When NoRedInk switched to Elm, Richard Feldman, who was asked about whether this impacted their hiring experience in any negative way, said that on the contrary, hiring had never been better, because although the pool of candidates grew smaller, their quality (either prior experience of working with type-safe functional programming languages, or enthusiasm for learning them) got higher.
When Alex Russell announced several openings at Microsoft for development of design systems with web components, and certainly no react, he said this attracted a lot of really strong candidates.
I am not saying that a good web developer should be able to pick up any exotic language, such as elm, or purescript, or rescript, or clojurescript at no time; but what I am saying is that as far as web frameworks are concerned, they shouldn't be a criterion for hiring, and are unlikely to become an obstacle to it.
Even though I prefer htmx, another emerging gravity is what LLMs are good at.
LLM-based coding/debugging/planning is a thing and going to stay, and if there are less code-bases to train LLMs, any new language/framework will be at disadvantage.
> Resume-driven development should not be a thing.
Pretend this is not about library choice, but rather about language choice. One language has 2 jobs, and the other language 13k jobs. I doubt you'd think for more than a second.
> One language has 2 jobs, and the other language 13k jobs. I doubt you'd think for more than a second.
The Hacker News website runs on Lisp. How many jobs do you see on the market that ask for Lisp? And yet, for what it is, this site is amazing! I don't see them rushing to migrate to a python backend and a react-based frontend, no matter how many jobs there are for those.
This is all true. But then, if you ran HN and needed to hire new devs, you could find them extremely easily just by posting on your own site. HN is a well-known project that people would want to work on because it looks great on their resume and gives kudos when talking to other devs.
In other words, HN does not have the problem that you are going to have if you use an unpopular language for your project.
If you choose LISP for your not-HN project, then you have a problem. The chances are very slim of finding any experienced LISP devs who are also in your salary range, within commute distance, want to work on your project, are a good fit for the team, etc.
You're probably going to have to hire a dev who is a good match on all those other things and train them up on LISP. Unless they've had experience with other functional languages (not that unusual, but not common either) then they're going to have to learn an entire new paradigm. All of which means that they'll spend the first six months going slow while they learn, and needing support from the rest of the team.
And you'll need to convince them to join you (probably by paying them more money) because if they spend a few years on your project learning LISP, they probably won't be able to use those skills for their next gig, and their current skills in a popular language will go out of date.
LISP is a great language, and if used well it will probably give you an advantage over the competition using other, more mundane, languages. But is that going to be enough of an advantage to counteract your slower onboarding, higher salaries, and greater recruitment workload?
lol Yea what a wild example to pick from. A web programming 101 website being heralded as why it's okay to use a tech like Lisp to build web apps feels pretty standard for HN though.
It's a list of articles and comments. It would take like 3 pages from W3Schools to build this thing.
Firstly, because this site happily handles the amount of traffic that puts many hobbyist sites that happen to get on its front page into a hug of death; so its developers must have done something right on the backend that is probably above the web programming 101 level.
But secondly, because this was precisely my point. One does not need a super popular front-end framework to make an awesome web product, and the HackerNews site is a testament to that.
No you're not. You're just trying to respond with something witty.
It's a message board with 1% of the functionality most sites people are building with frameworks.
> Firstly, because this site happily handles the amount of traffic that puts many hobbyist sites that happen to get on its front page into a hug of death;
Lol are you really implying it's hard to scale a message board?
> One does not need a super popular front-end framework to make an awesome web product, and the HackerNews site is a testament to that.
IT'S A MESSAGE BOARD. Nobody is building message boards anymore. Using HN as an example for anything other than building a dirt simple message boardsays more about your refusal to recognize the need to these new technologies than it does about those technologies.
> Lol are you really implying it's hard to scale a message board?
I am implying that it is beyond the "3 pages from W3Schools", as you put it.
> A. Message. Board.
Yes. A fast, reliable, accessible message board that I and many others thoroughly enjoy. An awesome product.
Again, I have never suggested that its ui is complex. In fact, it's glorious how simple it is. This is the point that those htmx people make: use simple tools for simple UIs; and also, try to make your UIs simple.
lol. Anytime React is mentioned people like you rush in to tell others just how great stuff like...checks notes...a message board is. As if it in any, way, shape or form adds to the conversation.
You just couldn['t help yourself from rushing in to defend the simplest site on the planet (lol written in LISP) as if it demonstrates anything other than some rando building a w3 schools site in a language no one uses anymore.
> That doesn't change the fact that HN is a dirt simple message board anybody could build.
What is this an objection to? If you follow this thread upwards, where was it suggested that we should be talking about things so complex that nobody, or only very few, could build? The whole pitch of htmx is that it is proposed for building things that anybody could build. The article in the title assumes that the target audience isn't building Google Docs, Figma, video editors, or CAD tools.
> How many jobs do you see on the market that ask for Lisp? And yet, for what it is, this site is amazing! I don't see them rushing to migrate to a python backend and a react-based frontend, no matter how many jobs there are for those.
You pointing out that the dumb simple message board is written in LISP and doesn't need anymore more is a bit absurd.
No shit they aren't rushing to upgrade it. IT BARELY DOES ANYTHING TO BEGIN WITH.
Anytime a certain class of developer see the word "React" that end up saying the most ridiculous shit. Nobody, I mean nobody, thinks HN is a site worthy of replicating or achieving unless they're part of the .0000002% who couldn't find a prepackaged board from Google search results.
lobste.rs is people from HN who think HN isn't nearly strict and niche enough.
All of those hacker news clones are by Hacker News people for Hacker News people, usually to implement features Hacker News never will.
Nobody outside of the HN community is holding up Hacker News as an exemplar of superior design or engineering, much less of a Lisp implementation. Anyone who's touched the Arc Lisp forum code knows how few fucks pg gave about the design of anything but the language itself. And still the original forum was so inefficient it would keel over and die under moderate traffic and internal links would time out and people's comments would just never post.
Reality is often disappointing. I'd love to be working deep in my Vulkan rendering knowledge, but it's clear right now with my lack of job that I need to grind leetcode instead and work on personal projects first. Graphics programming is already such a stiff bar to get into and it's only gotten stiffer as I go along.
I'm going a little bit on a limb by also cultivating Rust, so I'm not optimizing my RDD. But I still looked for a compromise of what I like and what's in demand.
> No Jobs
> Another practical reason not to use htmx is that there are, rounding off, zero htmx jobs.
> I just did a search for htmx jobs on indeed and found a grand total of two: one at Microsoft and one at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
> A search for “react”, on the other hand, gives 13,758 jobs.
> Seriously, developer, which of these two technologies do you want to hitch your career to?
I do not advocated for htmx; but this take is so bad!
Resume-driven development should not be a thing. If you are a professional developer, building a product for a user, your primary concern should not be the job market for when you quit the company you are working for, but rather making the best product possible for the user within the context of the current company. And if the product is such that it does not call for react, or some other javascript-rich client, then you shouldn't use it however many react jobs there may be on Indeed.
The evidence is so damning that htmx.org even opted to host it. That's not all- the author of the document is the one who developed HTMX!
(In all seriousness, this entire article is facetious and is highlighting the strengths of HTMX. They are not sincerely advocating for 'resume driven development'.)
while the article is tounge-in-cheek, i do think a lot of the criticisms are legitimate
The author of the article is the creator of htmx. There is some tongue in cheek here.
Right :-) That article did read as satire; but then, it is hard to tell what is satire anymore. I can hear people say the things he catalogues in the article; and I might agree with some of them, like the pollution of the window namespace, or the ancient syntax if this is indeed the case.
As I read, I thought, "I'm pretty sure I disagree with this guy" about once per paragraph. I didn't know. Thank you.
At this point, web design 'ecosystems' are essentially money whirlpools. They're complex, so they require programmers skilled in using them, who in turn make more sites which need more programmers, and so on, and the network effect takes over and cements this feedback loop in the structure of the jobs market.
And the frameworks are churned continuously and are also bug-ridden nightmares, so that continuous development and support is needed to keep websites functioning and secure.
Any reduction in framework complexity threatens the whole edifice.
I think the number of job postings is pretty related to factors that I do consider valid when selecting a piece of technology (eg: language, framework, etc):
- How easy is it to hire people with experience in this?
- Relatedly, how easy will it be for the org to maintain this software after I (or the original team) leaves?
> How easy is it to hire people with experience in this?
When NoRedInk switched to Elm, Richard Feldman, who was asked about whether this impacted their hiring experience in any negative way, said that on the contrary, hiring had never been better, because although the pool of candidates grew smaller, their quality (either prior experience of working with type-safe functional programming languages, or enthusiasm for learning them) got higher.
When Alex Russell announced several openings at Microsoft for development of design systems with web components, and certainly no react, he said this attracted a lot of really strong candidates.
I am not saying that a good web developer should be able to pick up any exotic language, such as elm, or purescript, or rescript, or clojurescript at no time; but what I am saying is that as far as web frameworks are concerned, they shouldn't be a criterion for hiring, and are unlikely to become an obstacle to it.
Even though I prefer htmx, another emerging gravity is what LLMs are good at. LLM-based coding/debugging/planning is a thing and going to stay, and if there are less code-bases to train LLMs, any new language/framework will be at disadvantage.
You can be productive in htmx after spending less than an hour reading the docs, even though there are (I assume) zero jobs asking for it
> Resume-driven development should not be a thing.
Pretend this is not about library choice, but rather about language choice. One language has 2 jobs, and the other language 13k jobs. I doubt you'd think for more than a second.
> One language has 2 jobs, and the other language 13k jobs. I doubt you'd think for more than a second.
The Hacker News website runs on Lisp. How many jobs do you see on the market that ask for Lisp? And yet, for what it is, this site is amazing! I don't see them rushing to migrate to a python backend and a react-based frontend, no matter how many jobs there are for those.
This is all true. But then, if you ran HN and needed to hire new devs, you could find them extremely easily just by posting on your own site. HN is a well-known project that people would want to work on because it looks great on their resume and gives kudos when talking to other devs.
In other words, HN does not have the problem that you are going to have if you use an unpopular language for your project.
If you choose LISP for your not-HN project, then you have a problem. The chances are very slim of finding any experienced LISP devs who are also in your salary range, within commute distance, want to work on your project, are a good fit for the team, etc.
You're probably going to have to hire a dev who is a good match on all those other things and train them up on LISP. Unless they've had experience with other functional languages (not that unusual, but not common either) then they're going to have to learn an entire new paradigm. All of which means that they'll spend the first six months going slow while they learn, and needing support from the rest of the team.
And you'll need to convince them to join you (probably by paying them more money) because if they spend a few years on your project learning LISP, they probably won't be able to use those skills for their next gig, and their current skills in a popular language will go out of date.
LISP is a great language, and if used well it will probably give you an advantage over the competition using other, more mundane, languages. But is that going to be enough of an advantage to counteract your slower onboarding, higher salaries, and greater recruitment workload?
No, you will find strong candidates who love Lisp and want to quit their job slinging Java to work on your Lisp project.
Yeah, maybe. Though finding them is still harder than just using Java in the first place.
Not just Lisp, but Arc at that. That's about as niche as it gets.
this site can also vibe coded in seconds.
lol Yea what a wild example to pick from. A web programming 101 website being heralded as why it's okay to use a tech like Lisp to build web apps feels pretty standard for HN though.
It's a list of articles and comments. It would take like 3 pages from W3Schools to build this thing.
I am deeply baffled by this kind of response.
Firstly, because this site happily handles the amount of traffic that puts many hobbyist sites that happen to get on its front page into a hug of death; so its developers must have done something right on the backend that is probably above the web programming 101 level.
But secondly, because this was precisely my point. One does not need a super popular front-end framework to make an awesome web product, and the HackerNews site is a testament to that.
> I am deeply baffled by this kind of response.
No you're not. You're just trying to respond with something witty.
It's a message board with 1% of the functionality most sites people are building with frameworks.
> Firstly, because this site happily handles the amount of traffic that puts many hobbyist sites that happen to get on its front page into a hug of death;
Lol are you really implying it's hard to scale a message board?
> One does not need a super popular front-end framework to make an awesome web product, and the HackerNews site is a testament to that.
IT'S A MESSAGE BOARD. Nobody is building message boards anymore. Using HN as an example for anything other than building a dirt simple message boardsays more about your refusal to recognize the need to these new technologies than it does about those technologies.
> awesome web product
A. Message. Board.
> Lol are you really implying it's hard to scale a message board?
I am implying that it is beyond the "3 pages from W3Schools", as you put it.
> A. Message. Board.
Yes. A fast, reliable, accessible message board that I and many others thoroughly enjoy. An awesome product.
Again, I have never suggested that its ui is complex. In fact, it's glorious how simple it is. This is the point that those htmx people make: use simple tools for simple UIs; and also, try to make your UIs simple.
> this site is amazing!
NO. IT. ISN'T.
lol. Anytime React is mentioned people like you rush in to tell others just how great stuff like...checks notes...a message board is. As if it in any, way, shape or form adds to the conversation.
You just couldn['t help yourself from rushing in to defend the simplest site on the planet (lol written in LISP) as if it demonstrates anything other than some rando building a w3 schools site in a language no one uses anymore.
> rushing in to defend the simplest site on the planet
This 'simplest site on the planet' does the job that it is tasked to do. Brilliantly. I am baffled by why you would scorn at simplicity.
> as if it demonstrates anything
It demonstrates that a great product (a product that many people use and love) can be built with simple tools. At least on the frontend.
> The Hacker News website runs on Lisp.
You mean the message board? The website that has a grand total of 2 functions: post and comment?
> And yet, for what it is, this site is amazing!
It's 2 colors and text. That's it.
> ! I don't see them rushing to migrate to a python backend and a react-based frontend, no matter how many jobs there are for those.
It's A MESSAGE BOARD. A. MESSAGE. BOARD.
> It's A MESSAGE BOARD. A. MESSAGE. BOARD.
Have you seen how many blog or portfolio sites people build with react? Sometimes even adding nextjs into the mix? Blogs!
So? That doesn't change the fact that HN is a dirt simple message board anybody could build.
> That doesn't change the fact that HN is a dirt simple message board anybody could build.
What is this an objection to? If you follow this thread upwards, where was it suggested that we should be talking about things so complex that nobody, or only very few, could build? The whole pitch of htmx is that it is proposed for building things that anybody could build. The article in the title assumes that the target audience isn't building Google Docs, Figma, video editors, or CAD tools.
It's an objection to this:
> How many jobs do you see on the market that ask for Lisp? And yet, for what it is, this site is amazing! I don't see them rushing to migrate to a python backend and a react-based frontend, no matter how many jobs there are for those.
You pointing out that the dumb simple message board is written in LISP and doesn't need anymore more is a bit absurd.
No shit they aren't rushing to upgrade it. IT BARELY DOES ANYTHING TO BEGIN WITH.
Anytime a certain class of developer see the word "React" that end up saying the most ridiculous shit. Nobody, I mean nobody, thinks HN is a site worthy of replicating or achieving unless they're part of the .0000002% who couldn't find a prepackaged board from Google search results.
> Nobody, I mean nobody, thinks HN is a site worthy of replicating or achieving
Wait what? You haven't seen all the hackernews clones that people make as an exercise of website building? You haven't seen lobste.rs?
lobste.rs is people from HN who think HN isn't nearly strict and niche enough.
All of those hacker news clones are by Hacker News people for Hacker News people, usually to implement features Hacker News never will.
Nobody outside of the HN community is holding up Hacker News as an exemplar of superior design or engineering, much less of a Lisp implementation. Anyone who's touched the Arc Lisp forum code knows how few fucks pg gave about the design of anything but the language itself. And still the original forum was so inefficient it would keel over and die under moderate traffic and internal links would time out and people's comments would just never post.
Except it's not a language. It's a library. Both of them are, in fact.
One language - JSX - has 10 jobs.
The other language - HTML - has over 30,000 jobs
lol JSX isn't a language. There aren't "JSX" jobs.
I feel like only a backend developer trying to score "gotcha" points could make this argument and be confident about it.
> backend developer
You mean a real developer?
The real developer who doesn't know that JSX isn't a language? lol Sure.
There are emacs modes for it, so I claim it's a language.
you are right and wrong.
Survival is more important.
On the other hand htmx is nice to have, if it solves your problem. Still you should use what benefits you in the context of a customer.
If you ask me, I think the web is for viewing static content, download content, or share links that your browser should delegate to an app.
That's obviously just an article pretending to criticise htmx
>Resume-driven development should not be a thing
Reality is often disappointing. I'd love to be working deep in my Vulkan rendering knowledge, but it's clear right now with my lack of job that I need to grind leetcode instead and work on personal projects first. Graphics programming is already such a stiff bar to get into and it's only gotten stiffer as I go along.
I'm going a little bit on a limb by also cultivating Rust, so I'm not optimizing my RDD. But I still looked for a compromise of what I like and what's in demand.
I appreciate the idealism but I appreciate being able to pay my mortgage more.
so true
I have to say: I absolutely love the kind of unhinged energy you radiate. Please keep being yourself.
Everything in that resonated with me.