Comment by steve_adams_86
4 hours ago
But what if tailwind has the most tutorials in the training set because it's worth learning, which led to it being fairly ubiquitous and easy to add to the training set?
I'm not expressing an opinion about that; it's a real question.
But what if Tailwind has the most tutorials because it's tricky and difficult? What if the intuitive, maintainable solution simply does not need so many tutorials?
I'm not expressing an opinion about that, I don't do front end dev so I have no opinion, it's a real question.
That's a good question, and I can't seem to think of what the maintainable solution that doesn't need as many tutorials would be.
CSS on its own is great, in a way, but also kind of awful if you don't fully grasp it. It used to be much worse, it got way better, but it still offers plenty of rough edges and foot guns.
Tailwind smooths some things over, but there are real tradeoffs. I prefer to use it quite often, but I don't have any illusions about it being better than plain CSS in any way other than it saving some time and brain cycles here and there. I don't think there's some perfect alternative hiding in obscurity, though. Tailwind is arguably popular because it often makes life easier. Not without drawbacks, but... I'd say it makes working on teams easier and there are a lot of community-generated themes, components, etc that make building things much faster and easier.
Hand rolled CSS is better if you're good at writing it, but in my experience, most people simply aren't.
Some people will disagree with me and say Tailwind is garbage, and that's fine, but they probably know CSS reasonably well. That makes a huge difference. Of the ~18M downloads per week, I would guess the vast majority of people using it have mostly copied and pasted stuff into their projects (or these days, let an LLM do it for them).
Now I want to ask one of these robots to implement something in “hand rolled” CSS and see what it does.
There are more HTML tutorials than brainfuck tutorials. The reason is simple. Don't be obtuse.
I don't think it's obtuse at all. I don't think brainfuck and HTML are comparable analogies, either.