wordsandbuttons
hiccup
wordsandbuttons | hiccup | |
---|---|---|
12 | 17 | |
482 | 2,634 | |
- | - | |
8.4 | 6.6 | |
7 days ago | 3 months ago | |
HTML | Clojure | |
The Unlicense | Eclipse Public License 1.0 |
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wordsandbuttons
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JavaScript Bloat in 2024
Meanwhile, all the pages on https://wordsandbuttons.online/ with all the animation and interactivity are still below 64 KB.
This one, for example, https://wordsandbuttons.online/trippy_polynomials_in_arctang... is 51 KB.
And the code is not at all economical. It's 80% copy-paste with little deviations. There is no attempt to save by being clever either, it's all just good old vanilla JS. And no zipping, no space reduction. The code is perfectly readable when opened with the "View page source" button.
The trick is - zero dependency policy. No third party, no internal. All the code you need, you get along with the HTML file. Paradoxically, in the long run, copy-paste is a bloat preventor, not a bloat cause.
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Writing HTML by Hand
I do all the https://wordsandbuttons.online/ by hand, and this is my top 10:
2527 p
- Homebrew Website Club
- Words and Buttons
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Rule of Three
Cloning things makes maintenance harder linearly. Generalizing things makes maintenance harder exponentially. Counterintuitively, generalization only makes sense on small numbers or reiterations, not the vice-versa.
I started https://wordsandbuttons.online as an experiment in zero-dependencies architecture. No third-party, no self-reference. Every page is completely independent. I was told, that as it grew, it would inevitably become impossible to maintain.
Five years passed, including a two-year pause for writing a book. I did more than half a hundred interactive tutorials and quizzes, and continue to add them when I have time. The thing simply refuses to go "too complex to maintain". All the maintenance problems I ever faced with this design were handled within minutes. If there is too much typing, I write a Python script. If not, I do the change manually, replicate it in a few pages, and go on.
As a free bonus, since all my pages are essentially hand-written, no dependencies = no uncontrolled growth, they are all fewer than 64 KB each. Ultra-fast to load, and I never get a "Reddit effect" since even 1000 requests a second is only 64 MB of data. It's green then tea too. I usually have a few hundred thousand visitors a year, and they barely consume enough electricity to boil a kettle of water.
I think this rule of three, like many others is just an attempt to escape well-known complexity issues by putting them under a carpet of less known complexity issues. I'm very happy to have ignored it when considering design for my site.
- Visualization of Common Algorithms
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If you can't write assembly like a poet, you can read disassembly like a hunter
Done! All the expandables have background colors now. https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons/commit/22ef6295c... Thanks for the idea!
- Words and Buttons Online
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Ask HN: How to you monetize a tech blog?
Very indirectly. My https://wordsandbuttons.online/ helped me cement a publishing deal with Manning, and the book I wrote for them (https://www.manning.com/books/geometry-for-programmers) works as a hourly rate magnifier in contract work negotiations.
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Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
I do https://wordsandbuttons.online/ as a personal-ish website. I don't append my face to every page but a visitor is usually a few clicks away from my other works so the site is de-facto more or less personal.
First of all, it's a nice hobby. No bullshit programming, no frameworks, no dependencies, no annoying editors. I just write my code and text and enjoy doing so.
Second, it gives powerful motivation to study. I'm now writing a new page on rational interpolation and just yesterday I accidentally found a very simple way to avoid the Runge effect. I was just playing with interactives and it came out of the blue. There is no way I would have learned it otherwise.
Third, it helped me cement a publishing deal with Manning. They came to me and proposed to propose them a book on geometry. And so I did. The book is called Geometry for Programmers and it's coming this summer.
Fourth, I do public lectures (or at least I used to before the war), and the audience loves interactive illustrations. So I usually turn my site pages into presentation-like pages and do lectures with them.
So for me, having a website pays off in multiple ways.
hiccup
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Writing HTML by Hand
Not equivalent, but arguably more useful for manual authoring: Emmet [0] was all the range a while back, and I still use it to write HTML. It comes naturally if you're used to writing CSS-like selectors, and mostly gets out of the way.
DSL-wise, I've rather enjoyed Clojure's Hiccup [1].
[0] https://emmet.io/
[1] https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup
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A History of Clojure (2020) [pdf]
* Single-Page App: shadow-cljs for the build concerns (https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs), Reagent with Re-frame for complex/large app (https://reagent-project.github.io and https://github.com/day8/re-frame). Even if we now prefer using HTMX (https://htmx.org) and server-side rendering (Hiccup way of manipulating HTML is just amazing, https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup).
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Clojure Bites - Render HTML, introducing selmer template library
I'd prefer hiccup.
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That people produce HTML with string templates is telling us something
That is why I like Hiccup/ Clojure so much: https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup It is very natural to produce something resembling a document in pure Clojure data structures and then just convert it to valid HTML. I think, Reagent has some hiccup extensions that are nice like writing the class or id with a . or # notation right in the keyword describing the tag. So there probably still is some space to improve the ergonomics and probably performance. Concatenating strings still wins performance wise by a lot.
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Building a website like it's 1999... in 2022
Clojure people have been doing this for a decade or so. It’s really so much better to work with. All started with Hiccup and when React came along you got Reagent and many more developments building on the idea.
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Rux: A JSX-inspired way to render view components in Ruby
You’re halfway to Clojure’s hiccup syntax[1] there.
[1]: https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup/blob/master/doc/syntax...
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I taught the chat bot an alternative syntax for HTML, called HBML, basically just braces instead of tags... we are so screwed
That, or Hiccup.
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[how to] Generate server-side HTML
I'm about to learn PureScript, coming from a functional TypeScript, Clojure and Elm background. To get a first taste for the language I thought I'd rewrite my Clojure test-app which generates static HTML files from JSON input using the (hiccup templating library)[https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup]. Is there some similar library in PureScript which would provide functions to create an HTML document and its content? I could not find anything when searching pursuit, but I might be just be using the correct search terms.
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what web framework do you use?
In Clojure thing are much more decentralised. We tend to use basic data structures along with data DSLs like Hiccup to build our software since this is the simplest way to convey meaning while retaining structure to perform additional data transformations.
- Hiccup: Fast library for rendering HTML in Clojure
What are some alternatives?
org-clive
Selmer - A fast, Django inspired template system in Clojure.
rednafi.com - Musings & rants on software
reitit - A fast data-driven routing library for Clojure/Script
vscode-didact - Framework and tools for providing interactive tutorials with active links that call VS Code commands
biff - A Clojure web framework for solo developers.
handbook - The Jitsi Handbook
re-frame - A ClojureScript framework for building user interfaces, leveraging React
love - LÖVE is an awesome 2D game framework for Lua.
clojure - Various Clojure exercises, utilities and demos.
TinyGo - Go compiler for small places. Microcontrollers, WebAssembly (WASM/WASI), and command-line tools. Based on LLVM.
colisper - Check and transform Lisp code with Comby (beta)