Tag Archives: abstraction

I’ve been debating whether I think CSS preprocessors are a good thing or not, so I wrote this in order to make my mind up.

I’m pretty old fashioned, so I’d resisted pre-processors until quite recently. But after working on a project built with Sass I found that I liked it a lot; just not for the reasons I thought I might.

It’s not all sweetness and light of course (I’m still a jaded cynic). Here are some of the arguments I’ve been having with myself recently, starting with the nice bits.
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I’m suspicious of people who don’t enable commenting on their blog – that just makes it a book. But this gripe aside, I like what Joel Spolsky has to say about abstraction in modern programming. Well, it pushes one of my buttons; perhaps “like” has nothing to do with it.

Sadly the people I feel need to appreciate his point the most probably won’t get past the second paragraph. That point, or at least the one I took away from it, is best summarized by this quote:

“[…] as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.”

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