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Discussion on: TailwindCSS: Adds complexity, does nothing.

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mickeyvip profile image
Mickey

Why tag the frameworks "bad" or "good"? Who are we to decide this for others?

If you don't like it - don't use it.
If you like it - use it.

We can take ANY framework and find people who hate it and those who love it.

We are free to express pros and cons of anything, but why not be respectful?

Why trash something if you don't agree with it?

I know many people and companies that love TailwindCSS and appreciate it.

People are putting much effort to produce something that they believe is helpful and will solve problems many of us have. The majority of feedback about TailwindCSS is very positive.

And then other people, based on their OWN PERSONAL preferences, pour dirt on their work.

That's just disrespectful.

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kerryboyko profile image
Kerry Boyko

Why tag the frameworks "bad" or "good"? Who are we to decide this for others?

We are software engineers. And what seperates "software engineers" from software developers is that while the developer can make something, the engineer evaluates, plans, and figures out the best way to make something before making it.

That means we have to take a look at proposed code and proposed tech. We have to take a critical eye to it.

Why trash something if you don't agree with it?

Because this isn't New Orleans Jazz.

I don't like New Orleans Jazz, so I don't have to listen to it. I don't buy New Orleans Jazz albums.

I am not in the habit of making detailed criticisms of what I feel to be the compositional problems of New Orleans Jazz.

But I have never had a team lead, product owner, or stakeholder come up to me and say: "For the next project, I'm thinking that everyone on the team has to learn how to appreciate and play New Orleans Jazz."

Engineers and developers are often required with working with technology that they not only don't like, but which makes their work harder. So when team leaders are thinking about incorporating a new technology into their tech stack, they should look for blog posts like this one to help them evaluate whether or not it's worth a try.

My thesis is not, as you seem to think, "I don't like Tailwind, and therefore YOU shouldn't like Tailwind either". That's a 12 year old's viewpoint of technology criticism.

Rather my thesis is: "If you choose Tailwind for a mission critical application, you will end up making your job harder, your application more brittle, and your team, in the long-term, will suffer."

You may disagree with that thesis, but you need to provide evidence to back your position, and "But I like it, and other people and companies like it, so shut up, you're being mean" is not an adaquate, professional rebuttal.

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mickeyvip profile image
Mickey

So will we see an article from you about how shitty New Orleans Jazz is and why no one should listen to them because you said so?

I wanted to answer your comment with examples of articles discussion pros and cons of TailwindCSS,
but decided that you seems to have much more time to write long answers than I do. Plus, having M.A. Journalism must help you with the language... not a lot, as the language you use is not of a high level.

Anyone can google for "tailwindcss pros and cons" and see that there are many results, most of them are pro TailwindCSS, others discuss the cons in polite professional manner, as opposed to your low level mocking language.

My personal experience (I started in 2005, if that's means something, and it does, since you mention your 12 years of experience), is that at my work we had a project to revamp the UI and a guy was hired, we asked him to do it right, CSS-wise he should use SCSS+BEM, and he did.

The product looked good, any changes along the way were fast.

He was the only doing the revamp. Then this guy left and 10 FE developers were left with the CSS. When any of those 10 people needed to look at the CSS that was written and change something, it was a quest. No one understood what was going on and how to find styles, because it was all SCSS functions and mixins. Hundreds of lines of code. Tenths of BEM classes.

We came to a conclusion that we need to throw the new-old CSS as fast as we could.

Then we got introduced to TailwindCSS and tried it on an isolated module. Everyone loved it. We moved faster than ever. We had maybe 50 lines of pretty formatted custom SCSS for that module.

The team loved working with TailwindCSS so much, that when this modules was merged into the main application, a pretty huge one, the rest of the people learned to use and utilize it in a matter of hours and there is no a single person in the team who doesn't want to use TailwindCSS now.

We are progressing really fast and we have very few custom SCSS to maintain and it's easy. Never been easier. And it is extremely maintainable. Plus - prototyping during live sessions with our UI is just a joy.

(That came out longer that I expected).

I can take every point and example you presented from your narrow point of view and make an argument how to change it a little to make it work much nicer than with plain CSS. But many here tried and I don't see the point. If one does not want to see the side of the other - there cannot be a dialog, learning and collaborating.

As many technologies, there are beset practices and design patterns that are emerging, and you didn't mention any of them or mention them in such a way that they looked bad.

So, again, if you think that technology A is not for you and you are sure (no idea who put you into a position to decide for anyone) that it's bad - present the cons, but do it at a level that people will pay attention and not is an unprofessional way you did here.

(I used "professional" and "unprofessional" a lot, because you seem to enjoy using it to describe yourself)

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kerryboyko profile image
Kerry Boyko

So will we see an article from you about how shitty New Orleans Jazz is and why no one should listen to them because you said so?

You didn't get the point at all, did you?

Plus, having M.A. Journalism must help you with the language... not a lot, as the language you use is not of a high level.

On the contrary, the fact that the language I use "isn't high level" is a massive compliment. :)

I came into J-school from a B.A. in History, and a 720 on the GRE's verbal section. I knew, and used, a lot of sophisticated, convoluted words. My vocabulary was labyrinthine and circuitous when I really wanted to show eggheaded impertinance.

My first J-school assignment came back with a lot of red ink on it. "Use the smaller words," it said. "Write for a smart 13 year old - someone with an 8th grade level of education."

The reason why is because the job of a journalist is to communicate ideas and information, not to obscure them behind flowery language.

Now I'm not going to say that I'm a professional journalist today, but one of the things I can still do well is communicate. If you work in tech, the ability to communicate complex ideas to your team simply is possibly the most important skill you need to know. And to do that, I try to use small words instead of big ones.

There are a lot of really good programmers who might not have a collegiate reading level in English (second-language, self-taught, still young), and I want to communicate to them, too.

So - I know you didn't mean it as a compliment, but thank you.