[brundolf]

> it's just an indication that the author chose to dive in without understanding the fundamentals first

You'd be surprised how many otherwise-competent engineers don't take CSS seriously enough to seek out the fundamentals, and instead spend their days avoiding it as much as possible and cursing it when they can't

[pjerem]

I totally avoid CSS at work because it’s just an insane whack-a-mole spaghetti based upon our own SASS framework written by a few designers that had to learn CSS without any mentoring (since they are in their own « design » team), and don’t understand the consequences of what they do.

So yes, I totally spend my days avoiding it. Not because I hate CSS (I love it in some way, and I miss writing elegant stylesheets) but because CSS is a delicate tool that is hard to be maintained by more than a few people.

[brundolf]

I'll agree that it's a delicate tool. Similar to Lisp, CSS is very elegant in the right hands but also heavily reliant on the devs sticking to strong conventions and principles. On solo projects, or projects with just a couple of devs, it can be wonderful. But it does tend to have trouble scaling.

Which is why, even though I don't love them, I respect the usefulness of things like CSS Modules that impose more scoping and constraint over CSS codebases. For bigger teams they do tend to be necessary.

[hn_acc_2]

There is a stigma amongst "real programmers" against "web developers". So a "real programmer" will never become adept at CSS because it doesn't appeal to their ego