I guess it is that HTMX just feels like one guy's side project. Granted he is great at posting. TFA feels like 37 Signals took the same idea and is trying really hard to sell it.
But not before Intercooler.js (the predecessor to HTMX) or Turbolinks (the predecessor to Hotwire). This is an idea that has been developing for as long as the web itself, I don't think it's important to assign inventorship of the concept as a whole to any one project. They've all been learning from each other and innovating in their own ways.
It's not just that the idea has been developed over and over, but it is constantly hyped as a return to the golden past, and yet never gets the love that new client side spa messes end up attracting.
htmx was a mashup of $.load(), pjax and angular 1 style attributes (very different conceptual model but I saw how angular used custom attributes and thought that looked better than the JavaScript api I had cooked up)
later on I figured out that what I was doing was generalizing hypermedia controls, but that took me years to figure out.
Turbo is more or less a continuation of Turbolinks, which has been around for ages. The Turbo repo goes back to 2015 (htmx starts in 2020), but Turbolinks is many years older. Of course there have been other "htmx-like" frameworks before; who even knows who or what was first at this point?
I don't think "feels like 37 Signals took the same idea and is trying really hard to sell it" is very fair (I've never seen them try to "sell it" at all, much less "very hard"). Regardless, you're allowed to "steal" ideas.
His mastery of millennial style memes is so rich. You can tell he just believes he is right and everyone else is dumb but he’s just “in it for the lols”.
I don't know _htmx personally, but I think he's more than willing to poke fun at those heavily invested in technology that is overkill for their needs. He most definitely is poking fun and laughing at the current mindset of javascript culture.
A good thread for understanding the different ways people think of it. I always go with @speg's interpretation, because the pejorative meaning just isn't used that frequently on HN:
> I tend to rethink of it as "the featured article".
