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"CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]

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Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]

#3
Assembly is not trivial lol. The instruction set is easy to learn yes, but the kind of bit manipulations that occur at ASM are not easy or simple. Look at optimized division sometime. Try reverse engineering, it's an art that takes decades to learn. I do agree with "Anyone who can learn CSS can learn assembly" though, anyone can learn pretty much anything with enough time and effort.

Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]

#5
Advanced results require advanced skills.

CSS is one of my favorite languages. And the only way I can consider CSS to be difficult is if you have no experience with HTML. If you try to do HTML by hand, then doing CSS by hand on top of HTML by hand is really easy and wonderful. And this is truly where you gain the fundamental framework for "getting CSS".

Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]

#6
What does learning assembly language mean?

So right now, learning CSS is pretty difficult. But luckily CSS specs have gotten pretty similar over different browsers, so its not terribly difficult even though some things are not exactly perfect.

But Assembly Language is rather straight forward, but the difficulty is that "assembly" is really a hundred different languages that depend on the specific processor architecture you are running on, and how that platform operates.

They are really orthogonal issues in the end, and comparing them is like comparing apples with automobiles.

Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]

#8
post #7

Yeah, I've authored assembly and CSS professionally (not at the same time) and would choose CSS all day long.

I've never written assembly but would assume CSS has better tooling available? browser dev tools for example

Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]

#9
This feels kind of like arguing that python is more difficult than brainfck because most people couldn't name all the ways to mutate a python object, and brainfck only has a handful of operations. CSS isn't (that) hard*. Modifying someone else's CSS and tracking down what selectors apply what styles is hard - but that holds true for any language, understanding code is harder than writing it.

*(other than positioning, that still kind of sucks, even with flex/grid)

Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]

#10
I don't understand the CSS confusion. Maybe because I've been doing it for 15+ years but it's extremely intuitive to me and I love working with it. Tailwind annoys me because it removes some of that flexibility / freedom for me to just solve a problem immediately with a new class or something.
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