Listened to this episode the other day. I can recommend, its funny and gives a fresh perspective, even if I don't agree with everything
"CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]
11–20 of 109 posts
Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]
#12What 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 architectu…
Pedantic nit: CSS specs are consistent across everything, because there's only one spec. (ignoring previous versions)
Specs generally aren't the problem. It's implementations. But those are mostly pretty good now too.
Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]
#13Ok I dont have time to listen to the podcast, and could not figure out which one it refers to. But I'll bite on the headline.
CSS is difficult because it was not designed with logic as input as a programming language.
It was designed from expected print output.
"I want to do this thing that is popular in New York Times magazine".
Floats, run-in, first line, multi column.
Static papers that were never meant to move around. And you were never meant to have floats in a float or first line with a different font size inside an auto width table.
This is why it is so riddled with edge cases.
Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]
#14If you are trying to "learn" a living language cover-to-cover, so to speak, you are doing software engineering wrong.
Is the tome of CSS more pages than the tome of x86? Maybe, but I'm not gonna read either cover-to-cover.
Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]
#15I 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.
The point wasn’t that CSS is necessarily confusing but that if you can learn CSS you can learn assembly and by implication write better performing software.
Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]
#16I 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.
It's because of the inconsistency.
For example, `margin: auto` expands left/right margins but not top/bottom margins.
....and 50 other such cases.
Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]
#17This just in: learning to use a CNC is more difficult than learning to use a saw.
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> Learning CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly
And styling with assembly is dramatically more difficult than styling with CSS.
Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]
#18Assembly 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.
"Anyone who can learn, can learn."
Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]
#19Yeah, I've authored assembly and CSS professionally (not at the same time) and would choose CSS all day long.
As a counterexample, I have also authored both assembly and CSS professionally (not at the same time), and I chose to completely abandon web development after endless battles with kludgey, inconsistent CSS vacuumed all the fun out of it.
(I imagine the situation may have improved over the last 15-odd years, but I'm not going back in to find out.)
I still enjoy assembly programming, though opportunities to use it have become a very rare treat.
Re: "CSS is dramatically more difficult than learning assembly language" [audio]
#20[deleted]