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itake·

I wish CSS tools had unique names

https://neat.bourbon.io/

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This is s recurring complaint and I never understood it. Names are made to be memorable, not unique.

Our brains are not a hash table, where every entity would have its own unique key and we'd use it to recall the entity.

<putting on “actually” hat> Brains maybe not, but google search will probably return not the things you’re supposed to be looking for if there are names collision.

If, in real life, your searches are just single keywords like "neat", I'd love to have a peer session with you, I'm bringing the popcorn :D

I've just searched a more typical (for me) "github neat css" in DDG and the 1st result is just as expected.

In this current situation I would google “neat css <some rare problem I was not able to resolve myself>” expecting it show me SO answers or reddit discussions. Instead I’ll be getting information about old and deprecated CSS grid library for Ruby on Rails. I am not saying it’s impossible, just added my “two annoying pence nobody was asking for” :)

I agree. Our brains segment information by context. In this situation, we have 2 libraries with the same name in the same context. Now for both of these, I have to store additional context alongside each name in my brain.

Aren't they, though? My brain seems very much like a hash table. Duplicate names just make the hash key longer, which is not a big deal but harder to remember.

That would be a hashtable whose values are lists :-). The buckets are for dealing with hash collisions not key collisions.

Yeah but which one has greater specificity?

NPM forces package names to be different.

But do we really want a registry for CSS?

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