5 ms·

In 1996-1998 as a teen I "made some websites" for local businesses. The one I made for my parents even had a search function (in PHP) in a CSV with their produc

In 1996-1998 as a teen I "made some websites" for local businesses. The one I made for my parents even had a search function (in PHP) in a CSV with their products (which were like 100). The CSV was generated by taking whatever Lotus Approach (their desktop DB) generated and transforming it with some custom Haskell code (I was a teen, what did I know). They clicked an icon to pull the data and another to run a FTP batch file. Fast forward, I understand nothing of the website being developed in React for my startup. The othe technical cofounder does grok it, but I could not lend a hand and can barely even supervise the outside help we brought. I like to think of myself as well-versed in a generalist manner. I can hack a custom sparse matrix (with a very particular structure I was able to prove an iteration for) inversion algorithm, but I understand nothing about painting the background the correct shade of blue!

recursivedoubts 6y ago
I have something for you: https://htmx.org https://htmx.org
- thanatropism 6y ago
  Yow. I have an application growing out of control in Streamlit (https://streamlit.io https://streamlit.io), which is a rshiny-type interactive dashboard gizmo. I'm now able to consider rewriting it with a proper front-end. It's like a whole world I had been sealed off from has reopened.
  - randyzwitch 6y ago
    (Note: I'm Head of Developer Relations at Streamlit) Out of curiosity, which features are you looking for in a "proper" front-end? Flexibility?
    - thanatropism 6y ago
      Streamlit is magic and I don't want this to come off as a dismissal, but it can be unpredictably unreliable. I keep having this issue if I run > 0.58: https://github.com/streamlit/streamlit/issues/1440 https://github.com/streamlit/streamlit/issues/1440 It's over a month old now, with multiple people reporting the same bug and iterating on the problem with no apparent narrowing towards a reason for why this happens, let alone a solution.
      - randyzwitch 6y ago
        Thanks for clarifying. Since HN isn't the right place for a detailed discussion, I would invite you to comment on that issue and try to help us work through it. As one of our engineers mentions in the linked issue, this bug is hard to trigger (as is the nature of many bugs), and she is working on a solution[1]. This issue has also been reported here[2], with the solution of adding time.sleep(1) inside the loop usually resolving that problem. [1] https://github.com/streamlit/streamlit/pull/1494 https://github.com/streamlit/streamlit/pull/1494 [2] https://discuss.streamlit.io/t/displaying-images-from-opencv/3014 https://discuss.streamlit.io/t/displaying-images-from-opencv...
        thanatropism 6y ago
        Yeah. What I should have added here, but didn't want to sound brash and rude, is that Streamlit should focus on having a reliable working product before spreading out as an org with a Dev Relations department. I know this is a complicated problem domain (because it's the web, Mathematica did this well with complex graphs in the mid-90s), but as it stands now my project has an input on which the graphic depends and a default value; the image breaks before the input control is touched. And it's not a slider, it's a dropdown that makes the app query a db first... I mean, I think I can do this in plain Ajax if I get my story right about sending images. But it's a hobby project meant to explore mathematical ideas... If you can't do sliders reliably, they should be moved to a beta branch. Streamlit overpromises and underdelivers. But it's a great project, I don't want to be too negative about it.
        randyzwitch 6y ago
        I see you've both commented here and on GitHub, so I'll make my last comment here and then we can address the specifics on your ticket (I didn't realize I referred you to your own GitHub issue). As I mentioned, there is a pull request already created for this issue; our head of engineering/founder says its being held up by a lack of tests before merging. This problem isn't a slider issue, but a race condition in our session state manager. Regardless, one month is a pretty trivial amount of time as far as open-source projects go, as well as in the history of Streamlit (project became public Oct 2019). Like all projects, we try and address things in the order of severity, and as far as this issue goes, it's a pretty isolated one, not an indication that the library is unreliable or somehow reflects that our engineers can't design at an early-90s level of engineering.
sushshshsh 6y ago
.componentInQuestion { whateverBackgroundTagIsCorrectInCss: #hexvalueForColor }, no?
- ljm 6y ago
  Well it depends, because maybe you're using Styled Components or some other library that ties you into the React/JSX ecosystem. Or maybe your app passes a 'theme' through various contexts and you have to find the right theme and find the thing you need to tweak the background colour for, which might be in a CSS file pulled in through Webpack if you're lucky. If you're not lucky, maybe there's some funky SASS/LESS setup where all of the colours are stored in variables describing their purpose, in one of a dozen specially categorised files for storing globals. Now there are six or seven values all with '#xxxxxx' as the colour value and you don't know which one it is, so then you're thinking, is this `lightBlue7` or `darkBlue-3` or `cyanish4`. Or maybe a few event listeners pull down style information into the component state after first rendering with a bunch of placeholders, so now the component you're looking to change the background of is a function of the time spent on page. Or, maybe you found some CSS and it was an easy change, but then the project is in Typescript and the CSS is actually derived at build-time from an enum containing all of the config, which is used to replace specially formed strings in the CSS while having sensible defaults in dev. If you're cursed, the CSS isn't even in your frontend at all and a server-side rendering system is generating your styles from DB backed configurations, which are queried by a graphql layer in your frontend so users can customise their UI in their profile settings, so you have to write a database migration and run a full deployment to add the new colour and its customisation UI to the frontend.
  - nefitty 6y ago
    If this seems absurd to anyone, this aligns closely with my experience in React and even more with Gatsby....
    - sushshshsh 6y ago
      I think if I was promoted to CEO, I would go full reactionary and demand that all front end javascript code must be vanilla and interact with the dom directly, and all styling contained in css
lostcolony 6y ago
Same for me. I even got into CSS and Javascript. Just, you know, right as Ajax was becoming a thing, before SPAs, before Rails even, etc. It was very straightforward. Now...I'm lost. Every time I poke at the frontend, I get lost again. >10 years as a backend developer of various stripes, three of those in Node even...still lost.

recursivedoubts 6y ago

I have something for you: https://htmx.org https://htmx.org

thanatropism 6y ago
Yow. I have an application growing out of control in Streamlit (https://streamlit.io https://streamlit.io), which is a rshiny-type interactive dashboard gizmo. I'm now able to consider rewriting it with a proper front-end. It's like a whole world I had been sealed off from has reopened.
- randyzwitch 6y ago
  (Note: I'm Head of Developer Relations at Streamlit) Out of curiosity, which features are you looking for in a "proper" front-end? Flexibility?
  - thanatropism 6y ago
    Streamlit is magic and I don't want this to come off as a dismissal, but it can be unpredictably unreliable. I keep having this issue if I run > 0.58: https://github.com/streamlit/streamlit/issues/1440 https://github.com/streamlit/streamlit/issues/1440 It's over a month old now, with multiple people reporting the same bug and iterating on the problem with no apparent narrowing towards a reason for why this happens, let alone a solution.
    - randyzwitch 6y ago
      Thanks for clarifying. Since HN isn't the right place for a detailed discussion, I would invite you to comment on that issue and try to help us work through it. As one of our engineers mentions in the linked issue, this bug is hard to trigger (as is the nature of many bugs), and she is working on a solution[1]. This issue has also been reported here[2], with the solution of adding time.sleep(1) inside the loop usually resolving that problem. [1] https://github.com/streamlit/streamlit/pull/1494 https://github.com/streamlit/streamlit/pull/1494 [2] https://discuss.streamlit.io/t/displaying-images-from-opencv/3014 https://discuss.streamlit.io/t/displaying-images-from-opencv...
      - thanatropism 6y ago
        Yeah. What I should have added here, but didn't want to sound brash and rude, is that Streamlit should focus on having a reliable working product before spreading out as an org with a Dev Relations department. I know this is a complicated problem domain (because it's the web, Mathematica did this well with complex graphs in the mid-90s), but as it stands now my project has an input on which the graphic depends and a default value; the image breaks before the input control is touched. And it's not a slider, it's a dropdown that makes the app query a db first... I mean, I think I can do this in plain Ajax if I get my story right about sending images. But it's a hobby project meant to explore mathematical ideas... If you can't do sliders reliably, they should be moved to a beta branch. Streamlit overpromises and underdelivers. But it's a great project, I don't want to be too negative about it.
        randyzwitch 6y ago
        I see you've both commented here and on GitHub, so I'll make my last comment here and then we can address the specifics on your ticket (I didn't realize I referred you to your own GitHub issue). As I mentioned, there is a pull request already created for this issue; our head of engineering/founder says its being held up by a lack of tests before merging. This problem isn't a slider issue, but a race condition in our session state manager. Regardless, one month is a pretty trivial amount of time as far as open-source projects go, as well as in the history of Streamlit (project became public Oct 2019). Like all projects, we try and address things in the order of severity, and as far as this issue goes, it's a pretty isolated one, not an indication that the library is unreliable or somehow reflects that our engineers can't design at an early-90s level of engineering.

sushshshsh 6y ago

.componentInQuestion { whateverBackgroundTagIsCorrectInCss: #hexvalueForColor }, no?

ljm 6y ago
Well it depends, because maybe you're using Styled Components or some other library that ties you into the React/JSX ecosystem. Or maybe your app passes a 'theme' through various contexts and you have to find the right theme and find the thing you need to tweak the background colour for, which might be in a CSS file pulled in through Webpack if you're lucky. If you're not lucky, maybe there's some funky SASS/LESS setup where all of the colours are stored in variables describing their purpose, in one of a dozen specially categorised files for storing globals. Now there are six or seven values all with '#xxxxxx' as the colour value and you don't know which one it is, so then you're thinking, is this `lightBlue7` or `darkBlue-3` or `cyanish4`. Or maybe a few event listeners pull down style information into the component state after first rendering with a bunch of placeholders, so now the component you're looking to change the background of is a function of the time spent on page. Or, maybe you found some CSS and it was an easy change, but then the project is in Typescript and the CSS is actually derived at build-time from an enum containing all of the config, which is used to replace specially formed strings in the CSS while having sensible defaults in dev. If you're cursed, the CSS isn't even in your frontend at all and a server-side rendering system is generating your styles from DB backed configurations, which are queried by a graphql layer in your frontend so users can customise their UI in their profile settings, so you have to write a database migration and run a full deployment to add the new colour and its customisation UI to the frontend.
- nefitty 6y ago
  If this seems absurd to anyone, this aligns closely with my experience in React and even more with Gatsby....
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    I think if I was promoted to CEO, I would go full reactionary and demand that all front end javascript code must be vanilla and interact with the dom directly, and all styling contained in css

lostcolony 6y ago

Same for me. I even got into CSS and Javascript. Just, you know, right as Ajax was becoming a thing, before SPAs, before Rails even, etc. It was very straightforward. Now...I'm lost. Every time I poke at the frontend, I get lost again. >10 years as a backend developer of various stripes, three of those in Node even...still lost.