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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

With languages like Python, PHP, JavaScript, Java, or C#, sure -- they're fundamentally very simple languages with a handful of gotchas to learn, they're easy and fairly interchangeable, and your overall programming skill is what really matters.

But there are other technologies or "languages" which, paradoxically, many developers think are trivial to learn, like CSS and SQL, but in which years of experience matter far more than any kind of natural programming aptitude. CSS and SQL are heavily implementation-specific, with edge cases upon edge cases upon edge cases that often wind sucking up the majority of your time. If you want complex queries that are still performed efficiently, or complex layouts that don't take weeks to get working properly in all the different browsers, no astronomical IQ or general programming aptitude is ever going to win against years of experience.

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I absolutely agree. Not to sound like I'm tooting my own horn...but at my job I jump around between backend work in java and some UI work with javascript/backbone with at least a good amount of efficiency in each. It's more of a change of environment/tools/goals (java - Use eclipse, log performance and errors with log4j, run unit tests. javascript - use a text editor, debug or maybe profile in chrome, test in different browsers etc)

However, I consider myself seriously unqualified to do anything relating to advanced styling/css.

Ahh, CSS. The hardest language to master.

As a back end developer slowly moving my way into the front end, I am glad to hear other people find it difficult.

I am glad to hear other people find it difficult, too. I really am.

I can't tell if you mean 'because I find it difficult too', or if you mean 'because it means I have less/easier competition'. Of course, this could have been your intention all along, but if it wasn't could you clarify?

Because I find it difficult too. :) Been using CSS for 7 years and still have some trouble with it, compared to typical programming which tends to be quite easy.

Cool! I definitely have trouble using CSS, I depend heavily on CSS frameworks & libraries to lay out anything remotely complex.

I use it a bit, but my focus is on the back end, so I never seem to get to the stage where I really understand it. Especially the nesting.

That's awesome, I thought my aversion towards CSS was just lazyness and lack of experience... I am not alone! yay!

CSS does feel a lot more complex than it ought to be, but it's dominated in every variable of badness by XSLT. That's the one language that defeated my efforts to learn it (mainly by killing all desire to do so).

Ouch. Even the mention of XSLT is painful.

I made an XSLT Generator and put a pretty little web interface in front of it.

Here's a cookie.

haha. I actually love XSLT. It's closer to a language like Haskell than it is to any common language, which is probably part of the difficulty people might have in learning it. It also uses structural pattern matching, which doesn't exist in any common language at all. That's unfortunate considering pattern matching is almost as powerful a feature as first-class functions are.

> Ahh, CSS. The hardest language to master.

Anyone know of any good tutorials? Everything seems either really basic, or really advanced. I know csszengarden has loads of examples, but I would prefer something that explains it (I can't find anywhere that explains the nesting and the relationship to the syntax / structure of the css file. I always feel like I am just trying random things until something works).

> I always feel like I am just trying random things until something works

Indeed.

One of the primary goals of a domain specific language is allow people to pick it up fairly quickly. If CSS and SQL fail right there, then we have a problem. I bet most of the difficulties you mention are historical accidents, which could be remedied if only our industry pulled its act together.

The problem with SQL is that you have at least four widely used implementations (MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and SQL Server), all similar or consistent at the core, varying wildly at the edges. In this case, "pulling its act together" would mean Oracle and Microsoft taking on massive expenses and risks to converge on a consistent syntax and procedural language.

Historical accident, sure, but remedying it might benefit future users at the expense of the vendors and the current ones.

There's no way the big SQL vendors would switch to a common language. They want the user lock-in. Switching would break code for existing users.

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