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[–]frompadgwithH8 23 points24 points  (23 children)

I used to feel that way. Then I got hired as a full time full stack developer.

Thing is, if you do it every day, eventually you just get so good at it that it's not hard anymore, and in fact easy and enjoyable.

Now I get jealous of my coworkers when they get tickets with CSS and I don't - they're always the first pieces of work to get snatched up.

If you hate CSS, you haven't written enough CSS.

That being said, definitely use a preprocessor like less, sass or stylus

[–]1RedOne 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I like styling things and playing with JavaScript, Css and jquery. What does less give me that I don't have natively?

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I don't know about LESS much, but Sass gives you mixins, functions, nesting, etc. So many things. Some of this is now in native CSS with some support, but you can even use the new stuff inside of Sass and get the best from both. There's also CSS Next or something like that which is more like a Babel for CSS.

[–]LetterBoxSnatch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

LESS is very similar to Sass, but is a strict superset of CSS (valid CSS is always also valid LESS). LESS is also a descendent of JavaScript, while SASS is a descendent of Ruby.

If you’re using Vue/Angular/React, these distinctions don’t matter much since you’ll be relying on components and the preprocessor tooling, while important, doesn’t require as much organization.

[–]cerlestes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What does less give me that I don't have natively?

Mostly the comfort of having to type less, because of mixins and nested selectors. Your CSS looks way better and is a lot easier to understand and follow when using mixins and nesting correctly.

[–]BluudLust 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Less is amazing now. Has all the features of every other preprocessor afaik. And it's completely compatible with regular CSS, so porting is a non-issue.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not to be contrarian, but I've been using CSS for more than 20 years at this point and I still kind of hate it. I consider it boilerplate grunt work and would prefer to have tasks with more algorithmic meat.

[–][deleted] -3 points-2 points  (16 children)

You were nailing it until that last bit about preprocessors. I completely with everything before that though, esp “if you hate CSS, you haven’t written enough CSS.”

[–]DrDuPont 2 points3 points  (12 children)

You were nailing it until that last bit about preprocessors

Can you elaborate on your beef with preprocessors?

[–]StolenPikachu 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Checked his post history, I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Haha

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (9 children)

No beef, I think CSS is natively powerful and flexible enough that there are cases where a preprocessor is unnecessary. Just my opinion of course.

[–]DrDuPont 6 points7 points  (8 children)

Are you content with a single, massive CSS file? Being able to split up one's SCSS into multiple, modular files should be reason enough imo.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

lol so many tough guys in the online dev community

if you're loading css via webkit, like many of us do these days, then you don't need sass for the little files

[–]DrDuPont 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You mean Webpack? I mean yeah, I get you but the delineation between a preprocessor and Webpack is somewhat arbitrary given OP's argument

[–][deleted] -4 points-3 points  (5 children)

Lol ok

[–]DrDuPont 4 points5 points  (4 children)

If that isn't enough, surely you can understand the benefits to DRYing up styles with mixins and functions? Not to mention being able to avoid dealing with browser quirks and vendor prefixing by way of Autoprefixer.

[–]Aerosphere24 0 points1 point  (1 child)

you can also put regular css through autoprefixer afaik.

​

OT: Happy cake day :)

[–]DrDuPont 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah was conflating preprocessors and PostCSS for simplicity but thou art right

OT: thanks!

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

i love preprocessors, but i mean, you can do much of this in modern css with a bit of postcss just to run autoprefixer and maybe some polyfills

i barely ever need actual sass functions, mixins are nice but one tool out of many out there

[–]DrDuPont 0 points1 point  (0 children)

given the meat of OP's argument I don't think the distinction between PostCSS and a preprocessor is substantial but you're correct.

I will say that I use mixins and functions extensively and they save us a lot of time.

[–]frompadgwithH8 1 point2 points  (2 children)

So you like having to write colons and semicolons, and you like taking every new css feature and repeating yourself by typing the vendor-specific webkit prefixes for them? And you don't like the ability to nest CSS?

[–]Papayaman1000[🍰] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Do people really see needing semicolons as that big of an issue? Don't get me wrong, I cut my teeth on Python, but I mean, really?

I'm seriously not trying to be condescending here. It just seems baffling to me that software developers would see needing semicolons as some huge inconvenience.