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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I learn a lot more about CSS from articles like these as opposed to books because it puts CSS features into context with the problems they were meant to solve. The historical context helps a lot, too. The way that I've tried to learn CSS in the past was essentially a random collection of tricks.

Are there any more articles like this? I'd read them all day.

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A good history of where modern JavaScript comes from (from old school to webpack and babel).

https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern-javascript-...

Helped me understand the how and why of webpack.

When people shit on modern web development, it's hard to explain how responsible tools like webpack and babel have been in pushing the web forward so we can actually build what we can imagine.

There is SO MUCH we simply don't think about anymore because the tools do the thinking for us, like CSS prefixing mentioned in the article. I can't remember the last time I manually prefixed a CSS property, I've used tools that have autoprefixing built in since 2015. I just don't think about it anymore. Nor the differences between ES3, ES5, ES2015, ES2017 or a host of other things.

This means my brain is free to spend that energy in other places and that's absolutely a godsend for productivity.

People shit on modern web development exactly because these kludges are necessary in the first place. Imagine if that time and effort was spent on something more productive instead.

The problem is that those tools, while solving some problems in the development stage, create a host of other problems at other points in time: first install, building, deployment, maintenance...

My uncle likes to call it “fictional nonfiction,” saying that the human brain is better at following stories than piles of facts.

Hence why The Phoenix Project was much better at teaching the basic concepts of DevOps than any DevOps how-to book or technical reference.

At St. John's College (back in the 90's anyways), we called this "teaching science and math historically" (as opposed to teaching the history of science and math -- which tends to emphasize dates and names).

By telling the story of science and math, we gained the context of who did what for what reasons. Which unlocked my understanding of science and math in a way that textbooks never did.

I've got this problem when teaching people things. When I need to explain a single feature, I feel it helps to give historical context for why things are the way they are, but it's hard to concisely give just the relevant context in that case - because there's just so much of it. Getting the whole picture in one go might be a lot better.

(Interestingly, the historical context could also pre-empt much of the criticism of "the modern web", or lamenting about not every browser building on Chromium.)

I have a slightly wild theory. I think that it has to do with my brain seeing the textbook topic as one item on a massive stack of items to study. Kind of like how much easier I find it to do a chore when it's not literally an infinifely looking sized amount of work ahead.

The original thesis is very instructive.

https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/

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