ColdFusion used to work this way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion
What surprised me is that when I went to look at the Wikipedia page for CF, apparently its latest release was this year! I haven’t heard anybody mention it in a very long time.
I worked at a major university that used ColdFusion. They had one guy furiously writing all these websites that were total one-offs. They didn't use source control. Every project was a copy of his original. If there was a bug, he had to update dozens of projects instead of maintaining common source across those dozens of sites. He was totally insane and making bank.
I was active in the ColdFusion/CFML community for a long time, and still run some production code in it. It certainly isn't popular, but just carries on quietly, powering a lot of internal applications you'll never hear about. Many run the open source version of it (Lucee).
Indeed it does. I maintain one such application while an in-progress rewrite develops. Gotta say, it's not been that bad and the Lucee docs have served me well, but for whatever reason I tend to be pleased/impressed by all kinds of tech, even when popular opinion is negative about it.
With how deeply embedded cold fusion was in many gigantic corporations I've worked with, I would not be surprised if it stays alive for decades to come because nobody ever can port off of it.
Don't remember the full context, but I heard a few years ago from Adobe that they could never sell another license to the private sector and government licenses would be self-sustaining.
Adobe has a whole lineup of enterprise products that people don't really read about. CF is deeply integrated into these products as well as other 3rd party enterprise products.
The company which bought my last startup, their main product (Trade Promotion Management tool) was in CF.
Definitely a little talked about language, but it does get some use.
Lucee took over and is still active (ish).
It's superficially tailwind-y, but in fact a sort of stenographic subset of SQL:
db-{table}-{column}-where-{field}-{value}-limit-{n}-orderby-{field}-{asc|desc}
db-users →
SELECT * FROM users
db-users-name →
SELECT name FROM users
db-users-where-id-1 →
SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 1
db-posts-title-limit-10 →
SELECT title FROM posts LIMIT 10
db-products-orderby-price-desc →
SELECT * FROM products ORDER BY price DESC
Certainly can result in some terribly inefficient access patterns, as there's no obvious syntax for joins. But enough for a toy project, and enough to hit the HN front page %)
We have strayed far from God.
/jk. Cool project even if I wouldn’t touch this with a pole.
This hilarious. Some people wouldn't know a good joke if it mugged them in an alley.
It's hard to tell these days. Anyone can now say "what if..." And have an agent build something that either looks a lot like (or is) that thing.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
The same can be applied to jokes. Almost no one recognizes them :)
So authors had to write it at the bottom of the page.
That's because most devs are so overwhelmed with having to keep up with XYZ that the joke isn't even funny.
Except that those are serious and work well for a lot of basic queries.
everyday there is a new `insert something related to react` framework.
Everyday we stray further from the simplicity god.
Having clicked on the link, it's one commit with the commit message "wtf"
The README also says "License: MIT - Do whatever you want with it (except deploy to production )"
It's that perfect level of absurdity that captures so much of the terrible complexity that often happens.
There's a guy complaining that the creator is poisoning the collective code used to train LLMs. If that's all it takes we have a moral responsibility to flood GitHub with garbage.
Surely a simple filter by number of stars on a project would improve the quality of code LLMs ingest.
You just convinced me to star it.
”I’m doing my part!”
Complexity demon everywhere.
hopefully I never have to review someone unironically using something similar in production code since I don't think I'll be able to stop myself from dropping a slur or two.
The author is on point: "Making AI and blockchain accessible for founders who want to ship fast."
Luckily this entire thing is a joke.
The actual disturbing thing is that given Next‘s track record of questionable security architecture, the author felt compelled to make the joke explicit.
You can't make jokes like this! Someone is going to take you seriously! Just like what happened with TailwindCSS in the first place!
From the site: "For fun only - don't use in production"
I lost it when looking at the commit message(s) which scored an all time record maximum on the notorious WTF/minute scale - preemptively, by maxing out the ratio.
This is a brilliantly clever homage to the WTF/Minute concept as proxy for code quality metrics and therefore is used among others as an indicator for maintainability where a high count inevitably leads to frustration and bugs.
Hilariously and awesomely executed.
Just because it uses the className attribute doesn't really mean it is "like tailwind"... SQL is not anything like CSS classes and cannot be composed in the same manner. It's basically just using className as a data attribute. You might as well just stick raw SQL in there and parse it... what is the point of the weird hyphenated pseudo dialect?
I strongly believe it's just a joke
>
For fun only - don't use in production!
Wow holy abstraction!
Weird stuff, seems to be vibe-coded using cursor and also the github issues are full of spam.
That's the funniest thing I've seen this week.
License disallows production use
MIT - Do whatever you want with it (except deploy to production )
It's a joke. The entire thing is a joke :)
No no, let him deploy to production.
It's not really very fun when these joke projects are built by AI.
There was something like that in Firefox in the age of websqlite(yes, that long ago) - I can't recall it's name but it seemed like a neat idea.
Like Tailwind isn't really a sales pitch for many of us.
Absurd. Thank you, you shouldn't have. I need it. I logged in for the first time in a long time just to upvote this.
Looks nice but is it vulnerable to injection attacks?
No LLM Prompts support in className? Useless.
This gives me Tom's a genius vibes
And we wonder why the web keeps breaking...
I think it's a joke proof of concept
I love how utterly insane this idea is. Sometimes thinking outside the box like this can yield results.
I didn't look to see if this is a joke, but seriously, is SQL still a big thing in web dev these days? Feels like it isn't. GraphQL is a thing.
GraphQL and SQL are not comparable or competing technologies. GraphQL is more analogous to a REST API. GraphQL can use SQL under the hood, or you can even hand serve the bytes (tongue in cheek here). It's just an over-the-network protocol to serve data.
a Node.JS server might use SQL directly or call out to a GraphQL API, but I literally don't think it's possible to let client-side JavaScript (safely) call a SQL database server directly.
GraphQL and SQL are about as related as Java and Javascript
So you have no idea about web dev?
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should"
-Dr. Ian Malcolm