Ask HN: Why do you all think that Htmx is such a recent development?

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  The missing star history graph of GitHub repos - https://star-history.com

  

I created the library that would become intercooler.js in 2012 and released it in 2013, based on a mashup of $.load(), pjax & angular attributes.

The world at that time was not ready to consider an alternative to the hot new ideas coming out of the big tech companies (angular from google, react from facebook).

In 2020 during covid i decided to rewrite intercooler.js w/o the jQuery dependency and rename it to htmx. The django community started picking it up because they were being largely ignored by the next.js/etc. world and they didn't have a built in alternative like rails has w/ Turbo.

In 2023 it got picked up by an ocaml twitch streamer, teej_dv, who knew some other folks in the twitch programming community. He told ThePrimeagen about it who took a look at it in July 2023 on stream and became enthusiastic about it. At the same time FireshipDev did an "htmx in 100 seconds" short on it. That lit the rocket. I was lucky that I also had just released my book https://hypermedia.systems at around the same time (it had been cancelled by a major publisher about a year beforehand.)

Another thing that happened is that Musk bought twitter, and a large number of big tech twitter accounts left. This opened up an opportunity for new tech twitter accounts to grow up, like a fire in a forest. I am pretty good at twitter and was able to take advantage of that situation.

Here's the story visually:

https://star-history.com/#bigskysoftware/htmx&bigskysoftware...

So I spent about a decade screaming into the void about hypermedia and had largely given up on the idea making a dent, rewrote intercooler.js just to stay sane during covid and then got very, very lucky.

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