Looks cool. I am not a web dev. How much Javascript/React/NextJS do I need to learn to build rich custom UI components+behaviour? Can I do it in entirely in Python?
Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
181–190 of 329 posts
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#182Looks cool. I am not a web dev. How much Javascript/React/NextJS do I need to learn to build rich custom UI components+behaviour? Can I do it in entirely in Python?
Yes its entirely in python. No Javascript/React/NextJS needed.
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#183My opinion on this :
* Web with python : yes, make sense, python is very friendly it's kind of the closest to no-code we can do
* No benchmark : ouch, no way I am touching this without knowing, at least in the big picture, what to expect
* Front-end : so this is a wrapper of Chackra UI which is itself a wrapper of React (which is the slowest framework out there) -> not really what I am looking for. I can understand that for some quickly made website this can be OK. For a serious dev I don't think this will have much appeal. I guess you need to target casual users.
* Not much bloat on the dependencies so this is quiet good on that front, I was expecting way worse.
* Your a startup and backed by YC and I see no business plan, priced service nor anything alike This is very suspect, for me as long as I don't understand how you are meant to work in the long run I will not involved myself using your library.
I am probably not your target user, I will stick with flask/tornado for prototyping my back-end and use lesser known but amazingly light and fast front-end framework. Good luck going forward.
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#184I'm not exaggerating but this might just be the highest impact library I've seen. As a backend developer who has lots of great project ideas but bail at the thought of having to use JavaScript and HTML, this library is a godsend! My only question is why it took so long for someone to implement it? And where are the equivalent libraries for Go, Rust and Java?
Well, I haven't looked into this one deeply yet, so I'm not sure what the differences are exactly. But there are many existing, broadly similar, projects. I see this as a solution to "I want to make an interactive website, and I don't want to touch the JS ecosystem at all and/or I really prefer python-specific libraries". This is my position exactly, so I sort of keep track of what's available. From that perspective,…
Bokeh, Dash, Gradio, Pglet, Idom, Anvil
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#185Went to your docs, saw the counter, pressed the button and saw a delay on increment when clicking a button (the simplest utility imaginable).
I don't want to hate, but if THIS has delay I don't even want to think about more complex state updates.
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#186Went to your docs, saw the counter, pressed the button and saw a delay on increment when clicking a button (the simplest utility imaginable). I don't want to hate, but if THIS has delay I don't even want to think about more complex state updates.
We are working on improving the performance, we are still pretty new but there are a few different ways we can speed state updates up. For state updates like pressing the counter a lot of times it can been seen, we will improve this.
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#187I'm not exaggerating but this might just be the highest impact library I've seen. As a backend developer who has lots of great project ideas but bail at the thought of having to use JavaScript and HTML, this library is a godsend! My only question is why it took so long for someone to implement it? And where are the equivalent libraries for Go, Rust and Java?
actually, as per the docs the framework is converting python code to Javascript. So you would need to JS skills to debug. Most of the problems in web front have been solved in JS (think CSS styles, state management) re-writting it in python would be pain, especially when everything compiles to js
State management hasn't really been solved.
Hence the whole debate about signals vs no signals last week. :)
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
So ruby has a JS transpiler - opal - https://opalrb.com/ I tried using it a little bit but the reality is if you need JS to make your app more interactable it's really worth it to just learn some JS. As soon as you need something complex the extra layer of abstraction just gets in the way and becomes more of a headache, and if you don't need anything complex then you don't need a fancy JS solution in the first place.…
You are assuming people use Opal because they don't want to learn JS. In reality it's that JS is a very messy language compared to ruby. You can be a lot more productive if you avoid JS entirely.
JS is a totally fine language. The entire browser ecosystem makes JS an incredible productive language for working on the web. You can disagree if you don't like the language personally but that doesn't change the fact JS gets the job done
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I haven't looked into this one deeply yet, so I'm not sure what the differences are exactly. But there are many existing, broadly similar, projects. I see this as a solution to "I want to make an interactive website, and I don't want to touch the JS ecosystem at all and/or I really prefer python-specific libraries". This is my position exactly, so I sort of keep track of what's available. From that perspective,…
This is a futile pursuit simply because you are creating a layer of abstraction over JS using another dynamic language so there's no real gain other than syntactic sugar.
Would you say the same thing about web assembly and emscripten? At least one of the above is based on those.
Using scientific and numeric packages from the python ecosystem is more than syntactic sugar, IMO. It seems like the JS world mostly ignores that stuff.
I have yet to try a real project with any of those python web tools. I know just enough HTML, vanilla JS and DOM API to cobble together ugly sites when I need to, so that's what I do. But I am optimistic that a better alternative will emerge eventually.
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#190You could make about a trillion dollars if, instead of asking people to write Python, you just gave them a WYSIWYG and let them build web apps by pointing and clicking like in MS Publisher/Powerpoint. Literally everyone in the world would buy it to make their own web pages. I get that nerds like to write code, but it is really depressing that we still can't just point and click and share content on the internet, we n…
Frontpage and dreamweaver! Haha. Wysiwyg.
Joke aside, some say that with AI... Writing code is getting ever easier... Even easier than using a nocode tool.