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complaining about CSS, Lisp, and Haskell and how they all do a thing that frustrates me
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I just realized that the main problem that I have with CSS is the same problem that I have with a lot of functional languages like Lisp or Haskell: I haven’t found any good way to figure out What I Can Do with something

like I can’t ask the question “I want this to be display: flex so what are the attributes that apply to flex specifically?” because the answer is Everything Ever, so I just have to memorize every single CSS property instead of sorting through a short list of “stuff you might want if you have a display: flex

and certain functional languages do the same thing where there aren’t functions that apply to certain datatypes (like a method for an object) but instead you can use Every Function Ever (of which there are probably hundreds) so good luck narrowing that down to things that can actually help you in any situation

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complaining about CSS, Lisp, and Haskell and how they all do a thing that frustrates me
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@kasdeya yeah . . . CSS is kind of just like that. because almost every element can be used in almost every layout context (and typically each layout mode gets more nested inside it to do anything non-trivial) it's very much a "just memorize all the options" kind of thing

for like ten years we've been wanting to write a guide of "here's the most useful things to learn, here's how to use each, here's how to combine them into a more complex layout" . . . maybe someday

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re: complaining about CSS, Lisp, and Haskell and how they all do a thing that frustrates me
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@tempest that would be an incredible resource to have. to be honest I’d love it if there were even a resource for CSS that just grouped different properties based on what those properties did (like color-related properties, spacing-related attributes, etc.)

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re: complaining about CSS, Lisp, and Haskell and how they all do a thing that frustrates me
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@kasdeya after the current [big work thing] is done and we have some energy back, we'll see what we can do

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re: complaining about CSS, Lisp, and Haskell and how they all do a thing that frustrates me
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@tempest ooh thank you! 💙

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