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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]

#21

Post by spaniard89277 »

oldstrangers wrote: post #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.

I don't understand either. I understand that CSS can be tricky sometimes, but more difficult than Assembly? Well, admittedly I have no idea of assembly or pretty much anything outside of your typical web stack, but it seems more difficult to me from the distance.

Not to mention game devs doing GPU stuff. I regret committing to programming with 30yo, in my 20s I probably would have the time and energy to learn much more.

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

#22

Post by marstall »

there's CSS and there's CSS.

macro layout stuff with complex component structure, shape changing web components, multiple scrolling divs, sticky footers, animations, lotta state changes, cobranding, 5-10 year old code base?

Yeah it starts to take a dedicated expert vs a dev who "knows CSS"

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

#23

Post by Waterluvian »

I think the fundamental lesson for me was to utilize the cascading nature in small, very clear logical units of tags. And don’t try to implement a grand unified theory of style for your website where everything is based on a brittle chains of selectors. It’s okay to give tags ids and select by the id instead.

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

#24

Post by thomastjeffery »

marstall wrote: post #22

there's CSS and there's CSS. macro layout stuff with complex component structure, shape changing web components, multiple scrolling divs, sticky footers, animations, lotta state changes, cobranding, 5-10 year old code base? Yeah it starts to take a dedicated expert vs a dev who "knows CSS"

That contributes to the overall difficulty.

Where do you draw the line between CSS and CSS?

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

#25

Post by leptons »

marssaxman wrote: post #19
fatnoah wrote: post #7

Yeah, 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…

I've done both CSS for about 26 years (since its first release) and Assembly language for about 35 years, and I love both of them - for different uses and different reasons. They are both great for the job they were meant to do. I even once wrote a JSON parser/serializer in 8-bit Assembly so the embedded device I was building could easily communicate with the browser front-end I had built. It was all pretty fun to me.

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

#26

Post by marssaxman »

Vanderson wrote: post #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".

My experience was completely the opposite. Learning HTML was effortless, and I had a great deal of fun writing pages by hand, easily creating whatever I could imagine through a straightforward hierarchy of nested tags. When CSS came along, it added a slippery, inconsistent layer of confusion where spooky action at a distance was the order of the day; nothing ever worked completely right, no matter how much time I spent grinding on it. I never could get comfortable with CSS and eventually gave up web development rather than continue fighting with it.

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

#27

Post by bavell »

paulddraper wrote: post #16
oldstrangers wrote: post #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.

It's because of the inconsistency. For example, `margin: auto` expands left/right margins but not top/bottom margins. ....and 50 other such cases.

Not a CSS guru but I'm pretty sure that's because display: block (the original document layout strategy?) grows vertically, so it doesn't really make sense to have an auto value for top/bottom. And I believe margin:auto only applies when there is a width constraint in the element.

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

#28

Post by psygn89 »

oldstrangers wrote: post #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.

I think Tailwind is nice when you're applying to-the-element but as css continues to grow and include more relational selectors I think we'll start seeing a more definitive line drawn in the sand where we just use css/css modules for the more advanced/relational parts and Tailwind for the to-the-element bits.

As for why it's confusing, I think it's due to the inconsistencies of the language. https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/mistakes

Also, you have to know the rules of the game to be proficient at css, and the rules will change from underneath you based on context, and unless you're in this space often it will often feel like voodoo and a constant search of "why isn't this working here when it works there... oh, because the parent is using position x". Also messing with css for over 15 years I know most of the rules of the game, and it has definitely gotten easier over time, but every now and then something will still surprise me.

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

#29

Post by Culonavirus »

oldstrangers wrote: post #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.

> maybe because I've been doing it for 15+ years

yea, that's about right, except the maybe part

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

#30

Post by CM30 »

Eh, as someone who's used both I'd probably disagree with that. CSS is at least a hell of a lot easier to debug than assembly, depending on the device you're writing the code for.

But it's a weird comparison anyway. The difficulties in CSS aren't using it to begin with, they're about all the edge cases, browser compatibility issues (for the more modern stuff) and its limitations for handling layout setups other tools have handled for years. Meanwhile, assembly's challenges are often that you have too few tools, and a lot of the language patterns you're used to in modern day programming languages are nonexistent.

Like the type you write for the SNES lacks for/foreach style loops, so something that's a two line piece of code in Java/PHP/JavaScript/Python/whatever can be like 15 lines in assembly there.

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