Here's the thing. An advanced website (or web app) is likely going to have a lot of JS on it already. Should most blogs? Probably not, unless they want interac

Here's the thing. An advanced website (or web app) is likely going to have a lot of JS on it already. Should most blogs? Probably not, unless they want interactive demonstrations of concepts, or a commenting system more advanced than what HN has. But beyond that, JS is everywhere. So at some point, there is JS running on the browser, code that has to be architected and maintained. So then someone proposes adding another language on the server into the mix, one that will generate HTML and deliver the JS. The dev experience is, likely, not as good. It is more complicated in a myriad of ways, debugging is harder, and the tech stack is more complicated and more fragile. And the thing is, good SPAs are really good. But the opposite strategy having every request round trip the server is going to suck in certain cases no matter what the developer does. Something as simple as the site being hosted far away from the user, or there being an above average amount of network latency, is enough to slow down every interaction. Now all this said, when I'm overseas and suck on 256kbit roaming, HN is about the only site I can use.