mablopoule

This article hit close to home (maybe not the last part). In my last few jobs, I'm horrified at how (mis)treated CSS and HTML is.

<rant mode on>

Very recently, I had the displeasure of coming back from a 3-weeks long vacation and discovering that the rest of the team added Angular Material on the project, and started to sprinkle it everywhere in the code.

Despite me (the only front-end guy in a team otherwise constituted only fullstack devs that are really more backend devs dabbling in frontend) asking them to not add Angular Material or any 'UI library', because this project is very simple, a mobile-only classic layout with a few simple forms.

Nothing in the designer's mockup for this project looked like Material Design, nothing; But since Angular Material is marketed as basically being part of Angular, then they told me that it was "good practice", and "a way to save time". As a result, instead having a clean DOM with a few classes and basically just a border-radius on the buttons, they did tons of ugly CSS to overwrite the Material styling that they themselves added, all in the explicit aim for them to avoid doing any CSS at all, ironically.

Just to reiterate, it's really a super simple app with a sticky header and footer, some form with a few borders, and some rounded buttons. I already did for them the main layout (it was basically a dozen or so CSS lines), but they ignored it all to add underneath tons of stupid Material components.

I mean look at this crap:

https://material.angular.io/components/toolbar/overview

<mat-toolbar> is a component that was actually imported in the project, which:

- does not have any JS behavior

- does not handle positioning (you can do it yourself with flex! How powerful!)

- does not have any ARIA role attached.

- but DO have a default color and background, thanks to the customizable Material palette!

In other word, it's a fucking <div> with a default background, but props to the Angular Material marketing and the mountain of content marketing out there to brainwash hordes of webdev into thinking that it's simpler to import an external dependency than to specify a background in one class.

Another example, here is the doc for the '<mat-divider>' component: https://material.angular.io/components/divider/overview

I understand why a Google designer would specify such element in a plateform-agnostic way, but for everyone else who's working in a web project that only used Material to 'save time', then why the hell would you import and use this component instead of just using the native <hr> tag available since the nineties ?

It's easier I guess, oh except for the planned migration to Material M3 that you will have to do in a few years if you want to be able to upgrade to the latest version of Angular, but I guess that adding some borders and some margins is just incredibly hard.

<rant mode off/>

The saddest part of all is that I love doing frontend dev in general, and as the articles point out the fundamentals of HTML/CSS/JS are incredibly stable and retro-compatible, yet all the ecosystem keep piling layers and layers of crap all in the sake of 'DX' and of 'good practice' (that seems to change every 6 months).

I do believe in the CSS case is that it looks too simple, deceptively even, so one can dabble in it without knowing the fundamentals, and so I believe that looks like CSS is broken the first time a junior dev has something with "position: absolute" that isn't positionned the way they expect, or when they find themselves coding in JS something that could be done with a handy CSS selector, out of ignorance of the available selectors.

As a result of this apparent simplicity of CSS, I think that there is a general reluctance to 'respect' the language enough to try to learn it really, which makes for more piles of broken CSS riddled with !important, and thus more people believing that CSS and HTML is fundamentally crap.

EDIT: I'm not critizising Angular Material in particular. I the React ecosystem I actually saw some 'UI component library' proposing elements to have bold or italic text. Yeeesh.

In line with this idea, at least the 'datagrip' part of Jetbrain can sometime be added as a paid plugin. In my case, I've worked for a long time with the "WebStorm + Datagrip plugin" combo when doing fullstack JS.

> A Tibetan teacher liked to say that westerners think that Buddhism is all calm and peaceful, and that compassion is soft and gentle

The excellent Youtube Channel "Religion for Breakfast" touched on this subject toward the end of his "Buddhism Has a Lot of Hells" video[1], where he explained that it's a case of orientalism (in the 'Edward Saïd' sense). In this case, since Buddhism was mostly imported in the west by hippy-style counter-culture movements, and since it was presented as an alternative to judeo-christian values, there was a tendency to omit things (like the concept of hell and damnation) that wasn't deemed foreign (to western culture) enough.

If one is interested in the history of religion, then I heartily recommend both "Religion for Breakfast" and "Let's talk Religion" Youtube Channels, they are truly amazing both in breadth and in quality.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKWmMLlSPsM

It would probably be pronounced as 'hash', which is also slang for weed, funny enough.

So, here's a few pointers of things I came across the past few years, and that you might like:

=== 1: Artifical Chemistries

You could check toward 'Artificial Chemistry', I bought one book[1][2] out of curiosity a few years ago, and while I haven't really touched it that much, but it's a really interesting perspective on computing that I haven't really seen talked about here (or elsewhere).

[1] http://www.cs.mun.ca/~banzhaf/AC-home.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Chemistries-Press-Wolfgang...

=== 2: 'Alchemist' esolang

Semi-related to the first point is 'Alchemist', "A non-deterministic programming language based on chemical reactions" that was shared here on Hacker News[3] a few years ago.

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150179

=== 3: 'Hexagony' esolang

Still playing with esolangs, I particulary like 'Hexagony' [4], which seems inspired by Befunge[5], but with Hexagons. It has a super cool online IDE [6]. If you don't know about it, then definitely check-out the Esolang Wiki, it's a treasure trove.

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35581768 [5] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge [6] https://hexagony.net/

=== 4: Soviet/Russian programming languages

Going back to the history of computing, there's the whole soviet side of computing that aren't well known in the west, but probably has fascinating stuff. I only can give you a Stack Exchange question[7] I found a few months ago about some soviet spacecraft, with one answers hinting at some soviet computer languages such as as 'PROL2' and 'DIPOL'.

[7] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/64366/reasons-behi...

=== 5: APL

It's a recurring subject here in HN, but on the off chance that you might be one of today's lucky ten thousand, then check out anything related to APL[8]. It's a fascinating language with extremely powerful construct to play with tabular data. Another APL-related thing is the BQN language[9].

[8] https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_sieve.htm [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35913241 (and obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/)

=== 6: Urbit

Last one, not my favorite, but definitely high on the 'esoteric' part, is 'Urbit', which is a very ahem special ecosystem that basically eschew anything familiar about the current state of computing. I personally feels that it's weird for weirdness sake, but it's something of a UFO. If you're insterested in Urbit, I would suggest to start with this article titled "Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane"[11]

[10] https://urbit.org/ [11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27268462

He might not be a coder, but he was very good at math though.

EDIT: forgot the word 'math'.

Also, it's one of the rare remaining flagship-tier phone who still allows headphone jack, which is the main reason why I bought a Zenfone last year.

I know this is urgent, but it won't be finished before end of sprint, so it will have to wait for next grooming session.

shudders

Oh, I haven't realized that the name of the book wasn't in English! It's "Des destinées de l’âme", which translates to "Of the fates of soul".

From what I've gathered it's a writer/poet/actor striken by grief who ponders about what happens after death, and about the notion of a soul, both historically (he seems to be speaking a bit about hinduism and greco-roman conceptions of a soul), philosophically, and theologically.

While this still doesn't justify the initial act of using someone skins, knowing the title in french makes it clear that there is a posthumous thematic, I haven't realized that it may not be obvious to non-french speakers.

Well at least I would brag that I have a great-great-grandfather at Harvard :D.

Joke aside, I see your point.

The binding of the book is part of it's value.

It's an almost 150-old piece of skin. Everyone who interacted with that poor woman is long since dead. Everyone who interacted with someone who interacted with that woman is either dead or in mid-to-late 70s, that's how far this is. I would be surprised if there was a 'family' who waited for this moment, and who would ask anything else than just to cremate the piece of skin.

I'm parisian, and part of my family is in the region for a long time, and yet it's not like I'm mourning every day because potentially some ancestor's tibia is being used as decoration in the catacombe.

So, with the same argument, nothing of value was lost when taliban destroyed the statues of Buddha, since we can read about those in books?

There's value in physical artifact too, it's sad to destroy those out of righteousness.

As for the statue, where those statue removed or destroyed/melted ? If it's the latter, then yes it's also historicidal, even if it's for the 'bad guys'.

Well, if it's not a significant item, does it need to be changed in the first place, then?

I agree though about passing things that could be preserved, but it usually involves a tradeoff, when things are too costly to maintain, or old building needs to give place for new one. Even museums aren't the place for a collective diogen syndrom.

The slightly heinous thing about this case though is that no tradeoff at all seemed to be involved for this book, no cost of preservation was cited, it's just modifying the past on the lights of very temporal values.

Because it's a fundamentally historicidal act, it's destroying some past artifact solely on the ground of contemporary morality.

While not on the same level as, it's the same though process that leads to the destruction of budda statues by the talibans, or the sanding of 13-century religious engravelling by french revolutionary.

Another trick I use frequently is to map a shortcut to activate/deactivate the vim plugin on the fly, which allows me to keep using some non-vim shortcut and behavior (especially search or selection) without having to go deep into configuring some vim files.

It's in line with internationalization, shortened as 'I18n', while doing a cute play on world 'ally', not sure what the fuss is about.

So much this.

I'm a Emacs guy, and still use it when staging/stashing/committing stuff, but when I rediscovered JetBrains tools, it was such a joy to use, I've used WebStorm (with Datagrip paid plugin) as my daily driver ever since.

I like Emacs but JetBrains stuff just work without needing to search obscure config on the web, it's a breath of fresh air.

True, but here lies thus the paradoxical thing about tools: a good tools is one that stays out of your way when you want to do something, while a bad tools is one that requires you to focus on itself instead of the underlying objective.

Thus, a tool is the least important part of a project, while choosing the right tools might be one of the most important decision of a project.

Reminded me of that tech-oriented colleague who never heard of an NFT last year.

It figured out it was best for him to continue that way.

No.

Working on an efficient and product-oriented company can be a joy, and 100% capitalist.

Working projects that are just politically driven, or where process took over common sense, that's depressing, capitalism or not.

Teams is nice enough when it works, but it tend to break far more than any other chat app I used. Stuff like getting the call notification (won't work on Firefox, I have to launch Chrome even though I can join a meeting on Firefox). The most annoying is that sometime it just doesn't display anything. Like no notification on my phone, or the lastest message will sometime not appear on a device.

Teams also have some very nice things going for it with it's Office 365 integration, but as a chat app it's just way more buggy than it should.

Imagine your therapist and your significant other had a mailing list where they expose all the confidences you said to them.

If that's not privacy hostile, then honestly what is?

If you have any good recommendation of book/documentaries, It would be wonderful :)

This, so much.

I do like SPA also, but some of the nicest projects I've worked with could be run locally by launching `python3 -m http.server 8008' on the right folder.

I'm happier when I can do something without a processing step, or the need for a package.json. Need a third-party script? Vendor it, and never have to worry about supply-chain attacks.

One of the funniest example of that is the Resident Evil 4 game, which was supposedly set in Spain, but had villagers spoke in Mexican Spanish.

Downvoted because holy cow you're out of touch with reality if you think that a $1M windfall, or even a 'meager' 40k/year wouldn't result in lifestyle change for a lot of people.

I really don't want to be mean, really, but for most people that wouldn't be just a 'boost' for saving, that would lift tremendous financial stress about the future.

At one point in my life I had a financial windfall that was many, many time less than a million, and yet it resulted in me not living month-to-month, and be able to for example buy a new computer if needed, within worring about rent and eating pasta for months.

Yes, but partially.

Chat works fine, same thing for meeting, however the online/away/offline status of coworker can be a little janky sometime (often have a blank dot instead), I cannot share my screen from firefox and most annoying of all, if I get a call from firefox (it always goes on my phone only).

So working fine as a daily drive, but still starting Chromium now and then when I know I'll get a call, or I need to share my screen.

I use arch btw.

Related to that, the "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" book is quite often featured as the go-to programming book in manga, creating the meme of the anime girl holding a copy of SICP.

Yeah but masculinity is also a good ideal to strive for, for you know, roughly half of the population.

The key is that it's not the only ideal men (or women !) can strive for, and there are people blurring the lines, which is absolutely fine.

I find Tate to be absolutely repugnant, and he clearly represent some of worst aspect of what 'masculinity' is associated to, but to his credits he also represent strength, assertiveness, drive, and even spirituality (with his recent conversion), which are values that aren't found in a lot of other place not associated with 'conservative' nowadays.

Exactly. I had the luck of working with a codebase that knew how to harvest the power of vanilla CSS (though vanilla CSS in 2020 was already the same as vanilla CSS in 2014), and it's quite powerful. Add to that the browser devtools and it can be very productive.