I’m kinda sick. I’m also frustrated because I spent a large part of the day writing a giant Reddit comment about my experiences in re-writing applications, and it was too long for Reddit’s API so it never got posted and I lost it. I’m pissed because it was a pretty awesome comment; I had a lot more to say on the topic than I imagined. It made me feel actually wise.
So, this post will be more stream-of-consciousnessy than usual.
I started fooling around with Sass/SCSS for the first time this week, specifically to customize Bulma, which this site uses for responsive design.
I like Bulma because it’s simple and because it requires no Javascript whatsoever. I like it better than Bootstrap, which requires jQuery and lots of other crap. Bootstrap also seems to be in a bit of a decline now. Bootstrap is still better off than Foundation, which is what my last big personal web project used. Foundation is dead as a door nail and has been for years.
The other cool thing in “Javascript-agnostic” CSS frameworks these days seems to be Tailwind. It seems conceptually interesting to me.
Despite using Bootstrap and Foundation, I never used Sass with either one. I’m not sure if I fully get the appeal because I’m just toying with Sass for now. I was pretty comfortable cascading my cascading style sheets. But I’m also not a front end person.
I do find it very weird that Sass has gone through at least 3 reference implementations, e.g. Ruby Sass, then LibSass, then Dart Sass. Like, I understand only wanting to maintain one implementation. I guess I don’t really know why you’d settle on Dart. I’ve never used Dart. Dart Sass is subjectively much faster than Ruby Sass.
I just read Dart’s documentation, and this overview is actually very clear and helpful. Now I know why I should (or more honestly, should not) care about Dart. I knew Dart was used in Flutter.
A lot of people I worked with who focus on mobile apps didn’t find Flutter that impressive, but I think that’s because they had this it-must-be-native-or-it-is-not-really-an-app mentality. I’ve never actually used it. The last time I did web-apps as apps, PhoneGap was the big sexy thing. PhoneGap is now dead, but it lives on under its new name of Apache Cordova. Though I think Microsoft tried to kill it. I dunno.
I find it interesting what ends up being very stable and what doesn’t. I think 20 years ago everyone would have recommended that C/C++, Java, Python, and JavaScript would all be worth learning. They all still are, though the relative importance of them all are pretty different now.
There might be a deeper point there about why certain things are more stable than others, and whether stability is desirable. I’m too tired to clearly think about that, let alone write about that. So I’ll probably save it as a hook t0 use later.