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> That's good, it means in a few years Tailwind will be considered a dead tech. And that’s good because of what, beyond your own personal preference as to your

> That's good, it means in a few years Tailwind will be considered a dead tech. And that’s good because of what, beyond your own personal preference as to your Framework Of Choice?

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
It is good because Tailwind actively fights the engineering choices behind the web platform, it doesn't understand them, it doesn't build on top of them in synergy and alignment, but it counteracts and nullifies them with religious fervor and zeal. Tailwind projects read like the wall writings of a mad man, who is convinced they've discovered the secret of the Universe. And that secret is compiling absurdly large, GIGANTIC lists of CSS rules, trying to reinvent the concept of a "syntax" within the constraints of an identifier name, then copy-pasting them inline all over your HTML code, with great redundancy and repetition, obscuring the actual DOM, and then treeshaking the gigantic class lists, so your browser doesn't immediately crash while opening a basic homepage. It's good because projects like Tailwind are built on marketing and emotion, they rely on ignorance and the web design equivalent of a "get rich quick" scheme that promises great results with no effort or skill, they seek to be viral, and when they succeed, engineering arguments about the merits of good design, or even basic logic cease to have any effect, and then these projects realign the rest of the community, so you see other projects "built on Tailwind", often not even for any reason other than it's cool to be built on Tailwind. So as the bubble grows, you start also seeing jobs requiring "10 years of Tailwind experience" more and more often, the projects you rely on are starting to switch to Tailwind, and now you have to use Tailwind, like it or not, because everything is glued to Tailwind. If the bubble keeps growing, then we also see a myriad of "like Tailwind but for JavaScript", "like Tailwind, but for SQL", "like Tailwind, but for web services" and there's no end to how far it can go, because bubbles, driven by the aligned wide-eyed stupidity of millions of delusional people can grow to wrap around the entire industry, before they pop. And when they pop, the damage and loss of value and productivity is immense. Having to redo big parts of an ecosystem, so you can scrub away all the millions icky sticky pieces of Tailwind mania off things, that is splattered on everything, and the smell is completely unbearable. So. When the bubble of BS stops growing, and starts shrinking, without massive damage: it's good. It's good. ^_O
- jonwinstanley 3y ago
  I'm not sure I fully agree with your view on what tailwind is and why it is growing. In my opinion, tailwind is gaining some popularity because some people find it faster and easier to use than writing traditional CSS files. I realise it also has some downsides, and seeing all those class names in the html is particularly ugly, but if the people using it got their project out faster, then surely there is a place for it?
  - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
    Technology choices, and life's choices in general are like a spectrogram of different wavelengths with positive and negative values... Like "this will help you today, but bite you in the rear tomorrow", or "this will help you tomorrow, but be annoying today". And it also varies by different conditional developments, if this happens, if that happens, can you implement a change, or the solution is "write-only" and so on. One of the tests of intelligence is can you defer immediate gratification, so you can reap higher rewards in time that compound themselves, or you lack impulse control and therefore you essentially have the model behavior of a house fly. This incessant focus on "here, now, me" that I see glorified, which doesn't consider at all anything outside a point in time and space that demands the impulse to be immediately satisfied... is not a good direction for tech, or for society at all. It's like choosing porn over a family. Obviously, I'm describing a broader problem here, not just some CSS tool, but Tailwind and many of the "frameworks" we see pushed in the industry do also embody this philosophy, quite clearly. Many things do these days. Ship faster, do less, faster, faster, faster. To what end? Are your projects so worthless, that you need to ship them today and then leave hell to yourself and others few months down the line? Not to mention that all the claims Tailwind is "faster", somehow, are written in weasel language to hide the fact Tailwind adds tangible, often significant lag and load to people's devices when they use your site. Does this matter? Of course, a fancy experiment is all good. You won't see me writing long posts about how Brainfuck is the end of humanity. But Tailwind has a good size community that actually believes their approach is superior, they're on a mission from God, and it's become viral, dragging in more and more people in, and influencing other projects into the same stupidity. What else does it mean to write a post called "Why Tailwind won". Won what? Was there a war going on? Won over what? Bootstrap? Bootstrap is a framework. Won over CSS? It runs on CSS, it's not an "alternative to" CSS, although it sure makes it impossible to use most of the benefits of CSS in a sane way. Yay, what a win. If Brainfuck was totally serious, and you saw your company is starting to write critical projects in Brainfuck, wouldn't that give you a serious pause?

> That's good, it means in a few years Tailwind will be considered a dead tech. And that’s good because of what, beyond your own personal preference as to your Framework Of Choice?

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago

It is good because Tailwind actively fights the engineering choices behind the web platform, it doesn't understand them, it doesn't build on top of them in synergy and alignment, but it counteracts and nullifies them with religious fervor and zeal. Tailwind projects read like the wall writings of a mad man, who is convinced they've discovered the secret of the Universe. And that secret is compiling absurdly large, GIGANTIC lists of CSS rules, trying to reinvent the concept of a "syntax" within the constraints of an identifier name, then copy-pasting them inline all over your HTML code, with great redundancy and repetition, obscuring the actual DOM, and then treeshaking the gigantic class lists, so your browser doesn't immediately crash while opening a basic homepage. It's good because projects like Tailwind are built on marketing and emotion, they rely on ignorance and the web design equivalent of a "get rich quick" scheme that promises great results with no effort or skill, they seek to be viral, and when they succeed, engineering arguments about the merits of good design, or even basic logic cease to have any effect, and then these projects realign the rest of the community, so you see other projects "built on Tailwind", often not even for any reason other than it's cool to be built on Tailwind. So as the bubble grows, you start also seeing jobs requiring "10 years of Tailwind experience" more and more often, the projects you rely on are starting to switch to Tailwind, and now you have to use Tailwind, like it or not, because everything is glued to Tailwind. If the bubble keeps growing, then we also see a myriad of "like Tailwind but for JavaScript", "like Tailwind, but for SQL", "like Tailwind, but for web services" and there's no end to how far it can go, because bubbles, driven by the aligned wide-eyed stupidity of millions of delusional people can grow to wrap around the entire industry, before they pop. And when they pop, the damage and loss of value and productivity is immense. Having to redo big parts of an ecosystem, so you can scrub away all the millions icky sticky pieces of Tailwind mania off things, that is splattered on everything, and the smell is completely unbearable. So. When the bubble of BS stops growing, and starts shrinking, without massive damage: it's good. It's good. ^_O

jonwinstanley 3y ago
I'm not sure I fully agree with your view on what tailwind is and why it is growing. In my opinion, tailwind is gaining some popularity because some people find it faster and easier to use than writing traditional CSS files. I realise it also has some downsides, and seeing all those class names in the html is particularly ugly, but if the people using it got their project out faster, then surely there is a place for it?
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  Technology choices, and life's choices in general are like a spectrogram of different wavelengths with positive and negative values... Like "this will help you today, but bite you in the rear tomorrow", or "this will help you tomorrow, but be annoying today". And it also varies by different conditional developments, if this happens, if that happens, can you implement a change, or the solution is "write-only" and so on. One of the tests of intelligence is can you defer immediate gratification, so you can reap higher rewards in time that compound themselves, or you lack impulse control and therefore you essentially have the model behavior of a house fly. This incessant focus on "here, now, me" that I see glorified, which doesn't consider at all anything outside a point in time and space that demands the impulse to be immediately satisfied... is not a good direction for tech, or for society at all. It's like choosing porn over a family. Obviously, I'm describing a broader problem here, not just some CSS tool, but Tailwind and many of the "frameworks" we see pushed in the industry do also embody this philosophy, quite clearly. Many things do these days. Ship faster, do less, faster, faster, faster. To what end? Are your projects so worthless, that you need to ship them today and then leave hell to yourself and others few months down the line? Not to mention that all the claims Tailwind is "faster", somehow, are written in weasel language to hide the fact Tailwind adds tangible, often significant lag and load to people's devices when they use your site. Does this matter? Of course, a fancy experiment is all good. You won't see me writing long posts about how Brainfuck is the end of humanity. But Tailwind has a good size community that actually believes their approach is superior, they're on a mission from God, and it's become viral, dragging in more and more people in, and influencing other projects into the same stupidity. What else does it mean to write a post called "Why Tailwind won". Won what? Was there a war going on? Won over what? Bootstrap? Bootstrap is a framework. Won over CSS? It runs on CSS, it's not an "alternative to" CSS, although it sure makes it impossible to use most of the benefits of CSS in a sane way. Yay, what a win. If Brainfuck was totally serious, and you saw your company is starting to write critical projects in Brainfuck, wouldn't that give you a serious pause?