Just because you suck at CSS doesn't mean CSS sucks

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of tweets about how much CSS sucks.

That includes “jokes” about how hard centering things is with CSS (also, nope, that hasn’t been difficult for years), how CSS “isn’t a real programming language,” how much the cascade sucks, and so on.

And here’s the thing: just because you suck at CSS doesn’t mean CSS sucks.

Yes, it has quirks. Every language does. JavaScript is weird. PHP is weird. Go is weird. Every programming language is a series of decisions and tradeoffs.

The cascade means that scoping components more tightly requires more specificity in the form of a parent class, secondary class, or some other more specific selector. But it also means you don’t have to constantly rewrite style declarations. It’s a feature, not a bug!

I’ve also seen the same folks who condescendingly say “CSS isn’t a real programming language” in one sentence say “no one knows how to write CSS” in the next.

Which is it, buddy? Is it too hard or too easy?

CSS is very learnable, if you put in the time. It also has a lot of depth, if you specialize in it. Just like JavaScript and PHP and every other programming language.

There are lots of people who know it very well, but they tend not to run in the same circles as the JS bros who talk shit about CSS all the time, because people specialize.

Now, if you don’t know CSS very well, or you find it hard to learn, that’s ok! I’m not here to gatekeep or say you have to know a language to be a developer.

But I would love if people who don’t know how to write in a language stopped putting it down as “beneath them” just because they suck at it.