[stavros]

I don't know if HTMX is an alternative to React/Vue/etc, it always struck me as an alternative to a purely HTML site, which I think 95% of web apps should be. I don't know what we get from avoiding full page loads that we don't then lose when we make sites janky and taking ages to load.

[dinkumthinkum]

Well there has been this push forever to eliminate desktop apps in favor of just web apps. Now, imagine we do this crazy thing that most businesses are convinced they need to do and we do what you’re saying, which is make all web apps do page reloads. All of sudden (maybe not so suddenly) computing in 2026 is much more frustrating than it was in 1996 (86?).

[hirvi74]

I've mainly been a full stack dev for most of my career, though I do have a some experience in low-level domains. Lately, I have been mulling over if I want to jump into different field of development.

I know Rust is gaining traction, and I have always found languages like assembly, C/C++ to be more enjoyable than the higher level languages. So, I might try and take a stab at Rust and see where it can take me. I'm just so fatigued from all the web dev stuff. The whole field feels too scatter-brained to me.

Instead of trying to solve useful problems, I feel like much of web dev's frameworks are just focused solving an already solved problem with slightly differing and dogmatic opinions.

[dinkumthinkum]

Well that is exactly right. These web frameworks, while they have their uses and have has some improvement on software engineering of web apps and have enabled sone benefits for users … largely the churn of these web frameworks with all these cute names are just reformulating the same technology over and over just with different opinions and aesthetics. People act like “technology changes all the time” but that’s not really what’s happening. We are “rediscovering” things so much in Web dev because we are still fundamentally doing, for the most part, what CGI programs did 30 years ago, pushing text back and forth with http verbs and return codes. Then, we make a huge deal when we get a web app to do something a desktop app could do 10-30+ years before.

[stavros]

I don't know if you've computed in 96, but computing now is orders of magnitude more frustrating than then.

[dinkumthinkum]

Yeah … that’s why I put the “86” in the parenthetical but I think it’s worse then 1986 too. I worry about it getting more orders of magnitude worse!