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I used to work with a brilliant chip designer who couldn't find the start button on a Windows machine. We all suck at something. Personally, I think CSS is th

I used to work with a brilliant chip designer who couldn't find the start button on a Windows machine. We all suck at something. Personally, I think CSS is the devil and should we should nuke it from orbit.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago
True. And I'm sure most devs that I mention in my comment actually get the job done. In their own way. I have paired up with some terrible programmers, with bad coding habits, weak knowledge of their ecosystem and no capacity for any kind of architecture design, but that eventually did better than me because they worked way more, and were more persistent. This idea that bad code will waste productivity is not that important if one person accepts to work 30 hours more than you every week, including to fix the mistakes they introduced by writing said code in the first place.
- rubber_duck 7y ago
  The level of complexity involved in developing even a basic CRUD solution these days requires knowing a tech stack going from DAL over networking, protocols to Front-end. Just getting all that shit to work and being able to reason through to get something working requires years of experience. If you can produce something working that satisfies the requirements you can't be terrible in my book, no matter what I think of your style
  - stef25 7y ago
    Something that works & satisfies requirements may still be terrible to maintain, expand or debug. That's the real difference between a well / badly developed app. Agreed on the levels of complexity in basic apps nowadays.
Vesuvium 7y ago
Let's start a css-less tech trend, shall we? :)
- strbean 7y ago
  All my websites are built with Unity targeting WebGL! /s
  - PopeDotNinja 7y ago
    What is this black magic? Serious question.
    - com2kid 7y ago
      Unity and WebGL is pretty common now days. You'll find a good chunk of the games at https://itch.io/games/html5 https://itch.io/games/html5 use exactly that.
    - strbean 7y ago
      Unity supports builds targeting WebGL and WASM. Last time I stumbled on an "io game" built this way, the lack of WASM debugging tools made it very hard to hack at the game :(
- arminiusreturns 7y ago
  I like CSS, can we start with JS first instead?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - AdmiralGinge 7y ago
    I wonder if anyone's tried to write a language primarily for manipulating the DOM that's less... "quirky" than JavaScript? With WebAssembly being fairly well supported these days I suppose someone with a background in language design could write an interpreter in C for such a domain-specific language and target WASM. Of course, people would say "what's the point" when JS is a thing and widely supported. I wonder if there'd be a) a compelling improvement in performance and b) a compelling improvement in reliability if we just wholesale replaced it based on lessons learned? I reckon even just keeping JS and eliminating implicit coercions would be a huge improvement (as well as maybe automatic semicolon insertion) and reduce the debugging times considerably.
cm2187 7y ago
As for regex...
neltnerb 7y ago
True, I have a Ph.D. and am very skilled with electronics and embedded programming. If you handed me an iPhone I would have no idea how to read text messages (actual situation). Same with the people I help technically at work. They're all brilliant scientists. They get confused by the difference between VGA, DisplayPort, HDMI, and DVI. Or get extremely frustrated when a button on the UI moves. I think software developers don't quite understand how big a deal it is to a 70 year old when the button to do something moves. Probably a quarter of my day is often just figuring out how to reconfigure things to their liking or else spend an hour retraining them because of some unnecessary UI change in Windows 10, after which they will still forget and ask for help again. God forbid you break apart an application into multiple programs or have online activation or a license server. I think I hear at least a daily rant about how you can't just buy software anymore and now you can only rent it for a bit. We have versions of software that are 13 years old because the publisher switched from an unlimited permanent license to a per-seat per-year license model. Rarely worth it when the instructors get confused by new software anyway.
- megablast 7y ago
  What? You can’t click on the messages icon? Can you use android? I mean, they are the same.
  - neltnerb 7y ago
    Yes, I use android all the time. I didn't understand how to switch between applications.
    - moooo99 7y ago
      I feel the same. A friend of mine asked me to take a photo with his iPhone XR a while ago. I couldn't figure out how to launch the camera app from the lockscreen. The gesture controls Apple implemented starting with the iPhone X are also very confusing for an Android user, eve though I also use gesture controls on my S10. But in the end, you'd get used to it as you did with Android.
giardini 7y ago
What? Move back to HTML 3.2?
- lmm 7y ago
  Yes. Style with inline tags, you're generating your HTML anyway. Use tag names describe what they do rather than "semantic" tags that aren't. Rather than agonising over which polyfills you need to get flexbox support, do table-based layouts that render reliably and quickly in any browser. People went crazy for the <video> tag in HTML5, but <embed> achieves the same result and a nicer UX to boot. What's not to like?
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    Let's just go ahead and just render each page as one big imagemap
    - lmm 7y ago
      Just the opposite. Imagemaps suck because the user can't resize their browser and have the page reflow appropriately. Too many modern styled websites view that as desirable feature.
      - kalleboo 7y ago
        More likely is we get one <canvas> tag and everything is powered by an opaque blob of WebAssembly
paganel 7y ago
> Personally, I think CSS is the devil and should we should nuke it from orbit. In all my personal projects I just copy-paste past CSS from existing projects of mine to new ones, at most just changing two or three colors.
justjash 7y ago
Yeah, had a college professor that hunt & pecked on the keyboard. He was smart and good at teaching, just terrible at typing.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago

True. And I'm sure most devs that I mention in my comment actually get the job done. In their own way. I have paired up with some terrible programmers, with bad coding habits, weak knowledge of their ecosystem and no capacity for any kind of architecture design, but that eventually did better than me because they worked way more, and were more persistent. This idea that bad code will waste productivity is not that important if one person accepts to work 30 hours more than you every week, including to fix the mistakes they introduced by writing said code in the first place.

rubber_duck 7y ago
The level of complexity involved in developing even a basic CRUD solution these days requires knowing a tech stack going from DAL over networking, protocols to Front-end. Just getting all that shit to work and being able to reason through to get something working requires years of experience. If you can produce something working that satisfies the requirements you can't be terrible in my book, no matter what I think of your style
- stef25 7y ago
  Something that works & satisfies requirements may still be terrible to maintain, expand or debug. That's the real difference between a well / badly developed app. Agreed on the levels of complexity in basic apps nowadays.

Vesuvium 7y ago

Let's start a css-less tech trend, shall we? :)

strbean 7y ago
All my websites are built with Unity targeting WebGL! /s
- PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  What is this black magic? Serious question.
  - com2kid 7y ago
    Unity and WebGL is pretty common now days. You'll find a good chunk of the games at https://itch.io/games/html5 https://itch.io/games/html5 use exactly that.
  - strbean 7y ago
    Unity supports builds targeting WebGL and WASM. Last time I stumbled on an "io game" built this way, the lack of WASM debugging tools made it very hard to hack at the game :(
arminiusreturns 7y ago
I like CSS, can we start with JS first instead?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- AdmiralGinge 7y ago
  I wonder if anyone's tried to write a language primarily for manipulating the DOM that's less... "quirky" than JavaScript? With WebAssembly being fairly well supported these days I suppose someone with a background in language design could write an interpreter in C for such a domain-specific language and target WASM. Of course, people would say "what's the point" when JS is a thing and widely supported. I wonder if there'd be a) a compelling improvement in performance and b) a compelling improvement in reliability if we just wholesale replaced it based on lessons learned? I reckon even just keeping JS and eliminating implicit coercions would be a huge improvement (as well as maybe automatic semicolon insertion) and reduce the debugging times considerably.

cm2187 7y ago

As for regex...

neltnerb 7y ago

True, I have a Ph.D. and am very skilled with electronics and embedded programming. If you handed me an iPhone I would have no idea how to read text messages (actual situation). Same with the people I help technically at work. They're all brilliant scientists. They get confused by the difference between VGA, DisplayPort, HDMI, and DVI. Or get extremely frustrated when a button on the UI moves. I think software developers don't quite understand how big a deal it is to a 70 year old when the button to do something moves. Probably a quarter of my day is often just figuring out how to reconfigure things to their liking or else spend an hour retraining them because of some unnecessary UI change in Windows 10, after which they will still forget and ask for help again. God forbid you break apart an application into multiple programs or have online activation or a license server. I think I hear at least a daily rant about how you can't just buy software anymore and now you can only rent it for a bit. We have versions of software that are 13 years old because the publisher switched from an unlimited permanent license to a per-seat per-year license model. Rarely worth it when the instructors get confused by new software anyway.

megablast 7y ago
What? You can’t click on the messages icon? Can you use android? I mean, they are the same.
- neltnerb 7y ago
  Yes, I use android all the time. I didn't understand how to switch between applications.
  - moooo99 7y ago
    I feel the same. A friend of mine asked me to take a photo with his iPhone XR a while ago. I couldn't figure out how to launch the camera app from the lockscreen. The gesture controls Apple implemented starting with the iPhone X are also very confusing for an Android user, eve though I also use gesture controls on my S10. But in the end, you'd get used to it as you did with Android.

giardini 7y ago

What? Move back to HTML 3.2?

lmm 7y ago
Yes. Style with inline tags, you're generating your HTML anyway. Use tag names describe what they do rather than "semantic" tags that aren't. Rather than agonising over which polyfills you need to get flexbox support, do table-based layouts that render reliably and quickly in any browser. People went crazy for the <video> tag in HTML5, but <embed> achieves the same result and a nicer UX to boot. What's not to like?
- kalleboo 7y ago
  Let's just go ahead and just render each page as one big imagemap
  - lmm 7y ago
    Just the opposite. Imagemaps suck because the user can't resize their browser and have the page reflow appropriately. Too many modern styled websites view that as desirable feature.
    - kalleboo 7y ago
      More likely is we get one <canvas> tag and everything is powered by an opaque blob of WebAssembly

paganel 7y ago

> Personally, I think CSS is the devil and should we should nuke it from orbit. In all my personal projects I just copy-paste past CSS from existing projects of mine to new ones, at most just changing two or three colors.

justjash 7y ago

Yeah, had a college professor that hunt & pecked on the keyboard. He was smart and good at teaching, just terrible at typing.