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Have you seen this year's State of JS? https://stateofjs.com/ https://stateofjs.com/ Makes one wonder if anyone even bothers to learn CSS nowadays. Perhaps we

by Tade0 6y ago

Have you seen this year's State of JS? https://stateofjs.com/ https://stateofjs.com/ Makes one wonder if anyone even bothers to learn CSS nowadays. Perhaps we wouldn't have Tailwind or CSS-in-JS if more people did.

machinelabo 6y ago
The word "Trend" makes me shiver in bitterness. Why are there trends in software development? Are we trying to solve problems or we're trying to be trendy? Is this a clothing industry? I would have thought we should use mature technologies that have been vetted and gone through the trough of disillusionment and onto the ramp of productivity. Proven tech stack that I can rely on gives me peace. Older the tech, the more reliable it is. The opposite of "trendy" is what we need to popularize and make it cool. It should be cool to use a 5 year old library in JS!
- rado 6y ago
  Trends are the single worst thing in this industry on all executive and developer levels.
- ketzu 6y ago
  When there is change, there are trends. You don't have to follow them, but some are working on what they think are improvements and others are interested in staying updated on them. Be it novel programming languages or javascript libraries. It is cool to use 5 year old JS projects like React. If you look at the projects listed in the report, you see the graphs going back to 2016. Which is 5 years ago. And how they have been popular for 5 years.
- brundozer 6y ago
  How does a technology become mature if no one wants to test it? I get your point, but we need both type of people in the real world: cutting-edge tech enthusiasts and stable products users. The problem is not that some people try out some fancy new tool, it's that they try it at work and waste lots of money without even being worried about it because it's not theirs. But in few cases it also pays off.
  - machinelabo 6y ago
    We have RFCs, proper PEP proposals, committees and a proper academic + enterprise + indie developer communities beta testing it and providing inputs. Not haphazardly monkey patching anything you see, add emojis to make it look cute and get 30k stars on GitHub. I want formalization of software development. It is orthogonal to experimentation and trying out fresh ideas. Change is good. But not towards a local optimum and getting stuck there.
  - Tade0 6y ago
    True, but I feel like a lot of the new stuff gets adopted just because a tech celebrity endorsed it.
1_player 6y ago
Excuse the French, but all the CSS libraries are bad because CSS itself is shit. Defending it is the classic textbook definition of Stockholm Syndrome. It is awful, disgusting, incredibly wrong and inflexible for the modern use case. If it weren't so bad, we wouldn't be here.
- cutler 6y ago
  Flutter/web might be the first transpiler to offer an alternative to CSS.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Care to explain your issues with CSS in detail? I agree it's Stockholm's, but just never can't even begin to state all the things that are wrong with it without sinking into Tech Tourette (ok for me the original sin is that it started by redundantly defining properties and syntax when we had this already in the form of HTML attributes; in which world did that ever make sense?)
  - sbergot 6y ago
    Not OP but here is my version: - css is not scoped by default. Predicting the effect of adding a new rule is very hard if you are not using scoping solutions or if you are not constently writing new class names with a strict convention - because of the first point, css is never refactored in most places. It becomes an ever growing monster of a code base - css selectors are build to write css that depends on html. A lot of webapp should be writing html that depends on a small set of css rules in order to get a consistent ui - the initial "semantic html approach" is counter productive for most webapps. This blog post is a very good read about this particular point: https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-concerns/ https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-...
    - tannhaeuser 6y ago
      Ah I see you're coming from a webapp developer PoV. In that case, I just wouldn't bother with CSS at all as you've got all the dynamics in your hand anyway to set styles as you please. Except pseudo-classes (even hovers), media queries, transitions/keyframes can't be specified in inline style attributes - just one of the many CSS blunders. Personally, I'm more interested in HTML as a document format in the original sense. Limited as it is, I just can't fathom the blackout moment where, confronted with a very basic HTML document plus a CSS stylesheet about the same size or more written in a completely different yet redundant syntax, somebody would say "yup, that seems like a reasonable document format for exchanging most of the world's text". Edit: regarding your scoping requirement, isn't just including the id or class of a component in CSS selectors or, when necessary, sass-like nested CSS rules enough of a scoping mechanism?
csunbird 6y ago
Firefox claims that this site is trying to fingerprint me. I wonder why?
- ev1 6y ago
  The loaded script appears to be some free geoip/country detection service, that as a side effect, also does maxmind.com/en/solutions/minfraud-services/device-tracking - unsure what it's used for but it's probably for giving a single page app access to language or country by geo
andyhmltn 6y ago
I fundamentally disagree with your point that CSS-in-JS is a result of developers not knowing CSS. That's ridiculous CSS-in-JS solves a lot of problems that people that have been writing 'real CSS' have been experiencing for a long time. Writing CSS for very large applications that deal with lots of shared components across engineering teams is a hard task. Some of those problems are alleviated by libraries like styled-components. It's not for every use case and should only be used when there is a genuine need (rather than 'because it's shiny.') But shrugging off CSS-in-JS because you don't understand it is a bit silly.
- Tade0 6y ago
  CSS-in-JS solves a lot of problems that people that have been writing 'real CSS' have been experiencing for a long time. Namely?
- cutler 6y ago
  'Trouble is some major frameworks like Material UI require CSS-in-JS. That's the crazy world of JS for ya.
earthboundkid 6y ago
The idea of learning Tailwind “instead of” CSS makes no sense, because Tailwind just gives short names to all the CSS properties.

by Tade0 6y ago

machinelabo 6y ago

The word "Trend" makes me shiver in bitterness. Why are there trends in software development? Are we trying to solve problems or we're trying to be trendy? Is this a clothing industry? I would have thought we should use mature technologies that have been vetted and gone through the trough of disillusionment and onto the ramp of productivity. Proven tech stack that I can rely on gives me peace. Older the tech, the more reliable it is. The opposite of "trendy" is what we need to popularize and make it cool. It should be cool to use a 5 year old library in JS!

rado 6y ago
Trends are the single worst thing in this industry on all executive and developer levels.
ketzu 6y ago
When there is change, there are trends. You don't have to follow them, but some are working on what they think are improvements and others are interested in staying updated on them. Be it novel programming languages or javascript libraries. It is cool to use 5 year old JS projects like React. If you look at the projects listed in the report, you see the graphs going back to 2016. Which is 5 years ago. And how they have been popular for 5 years.
brundozer 6y ago
How does a technology become mature if no one wants to test it? I get your point, but we need both type of people in the real world: cutting-edge tech enthusiasts and stable products users. The problem is not that some people try out some fancy new tool, it's that they try it at work and waste lots of money without even being worried about it because it's not theirs. But in few cases it also pays off.
- machinelabo 6y ago
  We have RFCs, proper PEP proposals, committees and a proper academic + enterprise + indie developer communities beta testing it and providing inputs. Not haphazardly monkey patching anything you see, add emojis to make it look cute and get 30k stars on GitHub. I want formalization of software development. It is orthogonal to experimentation and trying out fresh ideas. Change is good. But not towards a local optimum and getting stuck there.
- Tade0 6y ago
  True, but I feel like a lot of the new stuff gets adopted just because a tech celebrity endorsed it.

1_player 6y ago

Excuse the French, but all the CSS libraries are bad because CSS itself is shit. Defending it is the classic textbook definition of Stockholm Syndrome. It is awful, disgusting, incredibly wrong and inflexible for the modern use case. If it weren't so bad, we wouldn't be here.

cutler 6y ago
Flutter/web might be the first transpiler to offer an alternative to CSS.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Care to explain your issues with CSS in detail? I agree it's Stockholm's, but just never can't even begin to state all the things that are wrong with it without sinking into Tech Tourette (ok for me the original sin is that it started by redundantly defining properties and syntax when we had this already in the form of HTML attributes; in which world did that ever make sense?)
- sbergot 6y ago
  Not OP but here is my version: - css is not scoped by default. Predicting the effect of adding a new rule is very hard if you are not using scoping solutions or if you are not constently writing new class names with a strict convention - because of the first point, css is never refactored in most places. It becomes an ever growing monster of a code base - css selectors are build to write css that depends on html. A lot of webapp should be writing html that depends on a small set of css rules in order to get a consistent ui - the initial "semantic html approach" is counter productive for most webapps. This blog post is a very good read about this particular point: https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-concerns/ https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-...
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    Ah I see you're coming from a webapp developer PoV. In that case, I just wouldn't bother with CSS at all as you've got all the dynamics in your hand anyway to set styles as you please. Except pseudo-classes (even hovers), media queries, transitions/keyframes can't be specified in inline style attributes - just one of the many CSS blunders. Personally, I'm more interested in HTML as a document format in the original sense. Limited as it is, I just can't fathom the blackout moment where, confronted with a very basic HTML document plus a CSS stylesheet about the same size or more written in a completely different yet redundant syntax, somebody would say "yup, that seems like a reasonable document format for exchanging most of the world's text". Edit: regarding your scoping requirement, isn't just including the id or class of a component in CSS selectors or, when necessary, sass-like nested CSS rules enough of a scoping mechanism?

csunbird 6y ago

Firefox claims that this site is trying to fingerprint me. I wonder why?

ev1 6y ago
The loaded script appears to be some free geoip/country detection service, that as a side effect, also does maxmind.com/en/solutions/minfraud-services/device-tracking - unsure what it's used for but it's probably for giving a single page app access to language or country by geo

andyhmltn 6y ago

I fundamentally disagree with your point that CSS-in-JS is a result of developers not knowing CSS. That's ridiculous CSS-in-JS solves a lot of problems that people that have been writing 'real CSS' have been experiencing for a long time. Writing CSS for very large applications that deal with lots of shared components across engineering teams is a hard task. Some of those problems are alleviated by libraries like styled-components. It's not for every use case and should only be used when there is a genuine need (rather than 'because it's shiny.') But shrugging off CSS-in-JS because you don't understand it is a bit silly.

Tade0 6y ago
CSS-in-JS solves a lot of problems that people that have been writing 'real CSS' have been experiencing for a long time. Namely?
cutler 6y ago
'Trouble is some major frameworks like Material UI require CSS-in-JS. That's the crazy world of JS for ya.

earthboundkid 6y ago

The idea of learning Tailwind “instead of” CSS makes no sense, because Tailwind just gives short names to all the CSS properties.