Do you think Matt brain would blue screen if I told him I took my wife’s last name?

I wasn’t suggesting making JSON “REST” APIs (not actually REST, more accurately you might call them JSON data APIs or something). I meant protocols that are specifically meant for RPC, like gRPC, JSON-RPC, etc. Or message queues like RabbitMQ.

Ah I see, my bad. You mentioned Ruby on rails and GraphQL so I assumed you were talking about some kind of MPA situation.

Yeah htmx doesn’t replace data APIs for sure. Still not a fan of GraphQL for that purpose for the reasons above. There’s a lot of good options for RPC stuff, or even better, you can use message queues. GraphQL is just a bad idea for production systems, IMO.

I was replying to someone talking about GraphQL and Ruby on rails, not the OP of this post.

I don’t know what you mean by an API standard, but yes, it is technically a JavaScript library. But that’s only an implementation detail and the spirit of htmx is that you write very little JavaScript. Javascript is simply used to extend the HTML standard to support the full concept of hypermedia for interactive applications. An htmx-driven application embraces hypertext as the engine of application state, rather than the common thick client SPAs hitting data APIs. In such a model, clients are truly thin clients and very little logic of their own. Instead, view logic is driven by the server. It has been around for quite a long time and is very mature.

It’s fundamentally different than most JavaScript libraries out there, which are focused on thick clients by and large.

This is something often repeated by OOP people but that doesn’t actually hold up in practice. Maintainability comes from true separation of concerns, which OOP is really bad at because it encourages implicit, invisible, stateful manipulation across disparate parts of a codebase.

I work on a Haskell codebase in production of half a million lines of Haskell supported by 11 developers including myself, and the codebase is rapidly expanding with new features. This would be incredibly difficult in an OOP language. It’s very challenging to read unfamiliar code in an OOP language and quickly understand what it’s doing; there’s so much implicit behavior that you have to track down before any of it makes sense. It is far, far easier to reason about a program when the bulk of it is comprised of pure functions taking in some input and producing some output. There’s a reason that pure functions are the textbook example of testable code, and that reason is because they are much easier to understand. Code that’s easier to understand is code that’s easier to maintain.

Yeah our corporate machines won’t run any external media. I assumed that was standard practice.

Obligatory “JSON APIs are not REST because JSON is not hypermedia”.

GraphQL is a mess too as you throw out any ability to reason about query performance and it still requires thick clients with complicated/duplicated business logic.

If you’re doing RoR anyway, then go for https://htmx.org/. It’s much, much simpler and closer to how the web was originally designed. Highly recommend this book the author wrote on the subject (also provides tutorials walking through building an app): https://hypermedia.systems/book/contents/.

That’s what the diff tool is for.

Interactive rebase? There’s no GUI that actually does that well, if at all. And it’s a massive part of my daily workflow.

The CLI is far, far more powerful and has many features that GUIs do not.

It’s also scriptable. For example, I often like to see just the commits I’ve made that diverge from master, along with the files changed in each. This can be accomplished with git log --oneline --stat --name-status origin/master..HEAD. What’s more, since this is just a CLI command, I can very easily make a keybind in vim to execute the command and stick it’s output into a split window. This lets me use git as a navigation tool as I can then very quickly jump to files that I’ve changed in some recent commit.

This is all using a standard, uniform interface without mucking around with IDE plugin settings (if they even can do such a thing). I have many, many other examples of scripting with it, such as loading side-by-side diffs for all files in the worktree against some particular commit (defaulting to master) in vim in a tabpage-per-file, which I often use to review all of my changes before making a commit.

It can be nice when you successfully do a rebase (after resolving conflicts), but change your mind about the resolution and want to redo it.

Doesn’t come up that much, but it’s been handy once or twice, for me. It’s also just nice security: no matter how I edit commits, I can always go back if I need to.

If you do want to go the web route, I’d highly recommend avoiding SPAs and going with https://htmx.org/ instead. Much simpler, less code, entirely driven by your backend, while still giving you the ability to make nice interactive applications.

As a bonus, since you presumably have been working with Python anyway, the author of htmx has a whole book online walking you through building an app using htmx and Flask, a web framework for Python: https://hypermedia.systems/book/contents/

I made this mistake for ages because Haskell is so popular and it’s functional and pure, but it’s not actually a requirement for functional languages to be pure. OCaml isn’t.

I didn’t say that FP languages have to necessarily be pure, just that FP languages tackle the problem of mutation by arranging programs such that most things are typically pure and side effects typically happen at the periphery (logging is probably the one exception, though). This is true even in FP languages that allow arbitrary side effects in functions, it’s just not enforced by a compiler.

I agree Rust code has a different feel to OCaml code but that’s because it makes some things easier (e.g. mutation, vectors). You still could write Rust as if it was OCaml (except for the lack of currying), it’s just that nobody does that because it sucks.

That’s the entire point, though. It’s all about what the language emphasizes and makes easy to do. If it’s unnatural to write a functional program in Rust and no one does it, then it’s not really reasonable to call it a functional language. Writing functional programs is not idiomatic Rust, and that’s okay.

Fundamentally it’s a language oriented around blocks of statements rather than composition of expressions. Additionally, it takes a different approach to the mutation problem than FP languages: where FP seeks to make most things pure and push mutation and side effects to the edges of the program, Rust uses its type system to make such mutation and side effects more sane. It’s an entirely different philosophy when it comes to programming. I don’t think either approach is necessarily better, mind you, just a different set of tradeoffs.

I’m a professional Haskell developer and am very much immersed in FP. When I read Rust code, I have to completely shift my thinking to something much more imperative. Whereas if I read, say, Ocaml, the difference is mostly syntactic. This isn’t a slight, mind you. I quite like Rust. But it’s a very different paradigm.

Obviously there’s a small handful of things that would require a reboot, but unlike Windows, the vast majority of programs in user space don’t require reboots on update.

There’s also the fact that restarting Windows to update is a much slower and more disruptive experience than restarting Linux.

It’s not a functional language at all, even if it borrows ideas from FP languages. It’s an imperative language through and through.

The manufacturer obviously also makes the app and can control the encoding.

You don’t have to take arbitrary bytes. UTF-8 encoded strings are just fine and easily handled by libraries.

At minimum you need to limit the request size to avoid DOS attacks and such. But obviously that would be a much larger limit than anyone would use for a password.

This is completely different from electron. Nix dependencies will be shared if they share the same hash. Electron just blindly copies everything over every time.