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>I think Tailwind is more accessible to many[*] less experienced or CSS-oriented developers. Umm... How? You have to know CSS and be quite proficient to unders

>I think Tailwind is more accessible to many[*] less experienced or CSS-oriented developers. Umm... How? You have to know CSS and be quite proficient to understand how to map it to Tailwind. I don't understand this claim at all.

kristopolous 3y ago
This is called a leaky abstraction. I believe I'm convinced that if an abstraction is leaky then it's garbage. For instance, if I really needed to know say, jvm assembler to code Java then Java would be garbage as an abstraction layer because it would simply be creating problems where they need not be. Java however is clean, which makes it useful. I don't need to know the next level down. C is clean. JavaScript is. PHP is. Tailwind is not. Many frameworks are not. They promise benefits but deliver complexity and programmers get invested into the system and then can't see the reality because it's a classic cult effect of giving emotional salience to a lie. Eventually it collapses and a new one is formed. And for some unknown reason, this. Shit. Does. Not. Stop. It's really exhausting. Been programming nearly 30 years. So sick of it. It would be like if I did say medicine and every 3 months or so the medical community started tripping over itself by believing in the latest weird quack with orgone energies and magnets and started writing prescriptions to their patients about chakras or astrology and then being shocked, like actually genuinely surprised when it all collapses. Why do people run around like a bunch of frenetic teenagers to manufactured hype cycles in programming? Can we please fucking stop. Honestly.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  I don't view Tailwind as an "abstraction" in the same way that you might say Java is an abstraction over the JVM. If I'm writing Java then I'm only thinking about how Java works, not about the implementation details of the JVM. But when I write Tailwind I'm still very much thinking about the underlying CSS properties. Tailwind just gives me a much more convenient way to add the CSS styles that I already know, with significant reduction to my mental overhead. It hadn't occurred to me that people might be learning Tailwind as if it's a replacement for having to learn or understand CSS. If you treat it that way then you're bound to have a bad time, much like people who treat git as a series of commands to be memorised without any understanding of git's underlying data model. I'll also admit that I've only ever used Tailwind on small-to-medium sized solo projects, so I don't know how it would hold up on a big team. But then the CSS has been an agonising, unmaintainable mess on every big collaborative project I've ever worked on even without Tailwind, so what is there to lose?
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    > But then the CSS has been an agonising, unmaintainable mess on every big collaborative project I've ever worked on That's the other thing, tools are a really poor shortcut to competency and in practice just reflect the same level of mastery that caused the initial headache except with a different set of tools. This isn't pure. Some things are genuinely less insane than others. As an analogy, higher quality brushes, paint and canvases will make you a better painter but buying new brushes isn't going to be part of becoming the next Monet. Consumption isn't going to get you there. The real competency as you point out, come at higher level coherency, which frankly takes about 5-10 years to get any good at. It's a cognitive mastery that's mostly independent of tools. People want to seek out better tools as a proxy for the hard earned talent. It might get you further but at some point, knowing what you're doing is the only way to go. It sucks. It's hard. It's frustrating. It's always changing and it's also unavoidable.
kthejoker2 3y ago
N=1 but this is not true for me specifically. I'm a data guy, built my last professional web site in 2015 but build stuff for fun to this day. I grok flexboxes and responsive design through Tailwind more than I ever did in those years. I could certainly learn more pure CSS but there's no need at this point. I am happy and productive in my ignorance.

kristopolous 3y ago

This is called a leaky abstraction. I believe I'm convinced that if an abstraction is leaky then it's garbage. For instance, if I really needed to know say, jvm assembler to code Java then Java would be garbage as an abstraction layer because it would simply be creating problems where they need not be. Java however is clean, which makes it useful. I don't need to know the next level down. C is clean. JavaScript is. PHP is. Tailwind is not. Many frameworks are not. They promise benefits but deliver complexity and programmers get invested into the system and then can't see the reality because it's a classic cult effect of giving emotional salience to a lie. Eventually it collapses and a new one is formed. And for some unknown reason, this. Shit. Does. Not. Stop. It's really exhausting. Been programming nearly 30 years. So sick of it. It would be like if I did say medicine and every 3 months or so the medical community started tripping over itself by believing in the latest weird quack with orgone energies and magnets and started writing prescriptions to their patients about chakras or astrology and then being shocked, like actually genuinely surprised when it all collapses. Why do people run around like a bunch of frenetic teenagers to manufactured hype cycles in programming? Can we please fucking stop. Honestly.

arrowsmith 3y ago
I don't view Tailwind as an "abstraction" in the same way that you might say Java is an abstraction over the JVM. If I'm writing Java then I'm only thinking about how Java works, not about the implementation details of the JVM. But when I write Tailwind I'm still very much thinking about the underlying CSS properties. Tailwind just gives me a much more convenient way to add the CSS styles that I already know, with significant reduction to my mental overhead. It hadn't occurred to me that people might be learning Tailwind as if it's a replacement for having to learn or understand CSS. If you treat it that way then you're bound to have a bad time, much like people who treat git as a series of commands to be memorised without any understanding of git's underlying data model. I'll also admit that I've only ever used Tailwind on small-to-medium sized solo projects, so I don't know how it would hold up on a big team. But then the CSS has been an agonising, unmaintainable mess on every big collaborative project I've ever worked on even without Tailwind, so what is there to lose?
- kristopolous 3y ago
  > But then the CSS has been an agonising, unmaintainable mess on every big collaborative project I've ever worked on That's the other thing, tools are a really poor shortcut to competency and in practice just reflect the same level of mastery that caused the initial headache except with a different set of tools. This isn't pure. Some things are genuinely less insane than others. As an analogy, higher quality brushes, paint and canvases will make you a better painter but buying new brushes isn't going to be part of becoming the next Monet. Consumption isn't going to get you there. The real competency as you point out, come at higher level coherency, which frankly takes about 5-10 years to get any good at. It's a cognitive mastery that's mostly independent of tools. People want to seek out better tools as a proxy for the hard earned talent. It might get you further but at some point, knowing what you're doing is the only way to go. It sucks. It's hard. It's frustrating. It's always changing and it's also unavoidable.

kthejoker2 3y ago

N=1 but this is not true for me specifically. I'm a data guy, built my last professional web site in 2015 but build stuff for fun to this day. I grok flexboxes and responsive design through Tailwind more than I ever did in those years. I could certainly learn more pure CSS but there's no need at this point. I am happy and productive in my ignorance.