Please just try HTMX

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probably won't be able to use those skills for their next gig, and their current skills in a popular language will go out of date.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, there's two states here: the frontend state, and the backend state.

The name example is trivial, but in real applications, your state is complex and diverges. You need to constantly sync it, constantly validate it, and you need to do that forever. Most of your bugs will be here. The frontend will say the name is name, but actually it's new_name. How do you do fix that? Query the backend every so often? Maybe have the backend send push updates over a websocket? These are hard problems.

Ultimately, there is only one "true" state, the backend state, but this isn't the state your users see. You can see this in every web app today, even multi-billion dollars ones. I put in some search criteria, maybe a check a few boxes. Refresh? All gone. 90% of the time I'm not even on the same page. Push the back button? Your guess is as good as mine where I go. The backend thinks I'm one place, but the frontend clearly disagrees.

SSR was so simple because it FORCES the sync points. It makes them explicit and unavoidable. With a SPA, YOU have to make the sync points. And keep them in sync and perfect forever. Otherwise your app will just be buggy, and they usually are.

In a classic app, there's one entity that keeps the state (the server), and one entity that keeps how it is rendered. This is very easy to reason about, and the contract is very clear. If I want to understand what happens, then I can open my frontend app and see "Hello {{name}}".

In HTMX, the logic is spread. What I see is a construct that says "Replace this with the mystery meat from the backend, whatever that is".

Assume there's a styling issue. The name looks too big. Is it because the frontend is adding a style that cascades, or is it because the backend returns markup with a class? Now any issue has an extra level of indirection, because you've spread your rendering logic into two places.

> which is what you just did by dismissing the reality that client-side requires the same 3 renderers that server-side requires!

But what's complex isn't the number of renderers, it's where the logic happens. The HTMX website is full of examples where the header of a table is rendered in the frontend, and the body is rendered in the backend. How's that considered sane when changing the order of the columns turns into a real ordeal?

The main problem is that this is extremely, extremely expensive in practice. You end up in Big Webapp hell where you're returning 4mb of data to display a 10 byte string on the top right of the screen with the user's name. And then you need to do this for ALL objects.

What happens if a very simple page needs tiny bits of data from numerous objects? It's slow as all hell, and now your page takes 10 seconds to load on mobile. If you just rendered it server-side, all the data is in reach and you just... use what you need.

And that's not even taking into account the complexity. Everything becomes much more complex because the backend returns everything. You need X + 1, but you have to deal with X + 1,000.

And then simple optimization techniques just fall flat on their face, too. What if we want to do a batch update? Tsk tsk, that's not RESTful. No, instead send out 100 requests.

What about long running tasks? Maybe report generation? Tsk tsk, that's not RESTful. No, generate the report on the frontend using a bajillion different objects from god knows where across the backend. Does it even make sense with the state and constraints of the data? Probably not, that's done at a DB level and you're just throwing all that away to return JSON.

I mean, consider such a simple problem. I have a User object, the user has a key which identifies their orders, and each order has a key which identifies the products in that order. Backend-driven? Just throw that in HTML, boom, 100 lines of code.

RESTful design? First query for the User object. Then, extract their orders. Then, query for the order object. For each of those, query for their products. Now, reconstruct the relationship on the frontend, being careful to match the semantics of the data. If you don't, then your frontend is lying and you will try to persist something you can't, or display things in a way they aren't stored.

The backend went from one query to multiple endpoints, multiple queries, and 10x the amount of code. The frontend ballooned, too, and we're now essentially doing poor man's SQL in JS. But does the frontend team gets the bliss of not dealing with the backend? No, actually - because they need to check the database and backend code to make sure their semantics match the real application semantics.