This looks pretty clean, I actually built a framework when I was at Bank of America ~9 years ago called webgems that’s built on very similar architecture. Even using the repr for rendering nested. Curious if any
Contributors worked in it.
Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
231–240 of 329 posts
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
"incredible productive language for working on the web"
You can disagree if you want but that doesn't change the fact that JS is a huge pain in the neck to get the job done with.
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#233I don't want to downplay the library, but how hard is Javascript/HTML for the majority of python programmers? You might not make the most beautiful websites, but you can make a functional website if what you're displaying is primarily data to users because you're doing big data/AI and so forth and not setting up a consumer facing marketing platform. What's the use case here?
I hear your sentiment. As a backend / ML guy who tried to ship projects as a solo dev: I do understand JS/HTML. I understand the programming model of web and still build things the conventional way: templating on server which returns HTML. But lot of time still goes in CSS, to get things exactly working the way we want.
The catch is trying to keep up with Javascript complexity. Javascript/react world is entirely different beast. Spent some time understanding class based React. But then things moved to hooks. I sort of started grokking hooks. But now there is new clamour (not yet mainstream) about something new like server side components or signals or hydration or what not. Same is the case with Svelte. I tried the basic tutorials, understood it. But Svelte kit started talking about 100 different ideas about server pre-rendering components etc. I thought why bother? Jinja2 templating and bit of inline JS looked a better option.
Python devs want to stick to Python because it is still second best language to get something out there, quickly. Except for UI. Currently I'm looking into using HTMX as much as possible. If this thing solves for UI side of it then I'll definitely give it a try.
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#234My 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 t…
Any source on react being one of the slower frameworks and recommendations for alternatives? Just asking out of curiosity. I've been using Angular at work and always heard that React was a more performant framework.
https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/index.html
My personal favorite is Svelte
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#235Interesting stuff. A few questions:
How does it scale? Your deployment example (self-hosted?) just shows you how to run what looks like a simple server. Do you just run a lot of those and throw a load balancer in between?
Any thoughts on integrating with Django, FastAPI, or Flask?
What about mobile apps?
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really any worse than Python or Ruby, but you also get TypeScript which helps
I posit that it is both. Dealing with interactivity in the browser is subtle, complex and full of edge cases. JavaScript is also a horrible, broken language that’s not really fit for purpose. We’ve collectively invested a lot of time and resources trying to improve the experience of working with it, but the point still stands.
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Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Last.fm is one of them Can you talk a little bit more about this? What kind of issues does Last.fm have that is related to or caused by Django?
I'll try! Last.fm started many years ago, in the early '00s (pretty much like Django!). They decided to use Django to serve their website and API. As the years went by, some issues and limitations started to show up: the API has several quirks they can't fix, the frontend -even after the redesign- is slow, and interactions feel clunky and outdated (like early AJAX attempts). The API can't be easily modified -and some…
What you described would have happened with any other framework available at that time when you make poor design choices. I don't see anything django specific there
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#238So the state is managed by backend similar to signalr blazor? If this statement is correct then it's safe to say this approach doesn't scale well.
What would have been interesting is creating blazor web assembly equivalent for python.
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#239It's funny that I'm currently going in the completely opposite direction of using JavaScript to build AI apps (with tensorflow.js). I'm a frontend dev of course.
I think using one language for everything does have the benefit of reducing context switching.
It's about picking your comfort language for higher productivity, while making sacrifices somewhere like performance and less idiomatic.
Re: Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
#240I started as a backend dev, moved to full-stack and initially didn't find JS too alluring. I've since liked JS for frontend stuff (not so much backend still). I _really_ like Dash for some things but quickly find myself hitting the boundaries of it's use cases. I will def have to check this out and keep it on my radar. I used to work for a consulting place where we would have to spin up tons of one-off apps and this…
What are the edge cases of Dahs you ran into?