A recurring question from some htmx contributors is why htmx isn’t written in TypeScript, or, for that matter, why htmx lacks any build step at all. The full htmx source is a single 3,500-line JavaScript file; if you want to contribute to htmx, you do so by modifying the htmx.js file, the same file that gets sent to browsers in production, give or take minification and compression. The best reason to write a library in plain JavaScript is that it lasts forever. This is arguably JavaScript’s single most underrated feature. While I’m sure there are some corner cases, JavaScript from 1999 that ran in Netscape Navigator will run unaltered, alongside modern code, in Google Chrome downloaded yesterday. That is true for very few programming environments. It’s certainly not true for Python, or Java, or C, which all have versioning mechanisms where opting for new language features will force you off of deprecated APIs.
