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Comment by Cless | Hacker News Reader

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!

> 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.

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.

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