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Comment by xtian | Hacker News Reader

My experience mirrors yours 100%. What the parent comments seem to be describing are Tailwind in a context where people don’t know CSS that well. Yes, that will be a catastrophe. But so will SASS or vanilla CSS — even more so. Tailwind is a utility, not a replacement for fundamental knowledge.

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On the other hand, people that know CSS very well will not need suddenly tailwind to get some utility classes.

There are tons of people who are perfectly proficient in CSS who are not won over to utility classes. As you become more won over, you start writing files full of utility classes that… wait for it… someone else has already written! With huge coverage over CSS! And really good defaults! And lots of escape hatches!

And to top it off, nothing guarantees your colleagues are actually going to use those instead of creating their own ad hoc “semantic CSS” or whatever their preference is.

If you decide you’re a utility-only frontend, then… there’s a great tool for that!

So now why on earth are you still plugging away at that utils.css?

And people that know (Python|Ruby|PHP|Go|Etc) don't need the framework to implement a web app, yet we use them anyway.

What is the value of reimplementing a bunch of this if it already exists? What's the value of having every developer learn some poorly-documented in-house system when we can use one that's already out there with full documentation, examples, references on StackOverflow, etc?

As a programmer that likes to paint, I think the difference is that web pages are a visually artistic medium. Artists that have unique fine detailed visions often feel the need to use low levels tools to perfectly achieve those visions. I guess this this applies more to individuals than teams however.

I've been writing CSS since 2009 and I love Tailwind. It allows me to very quickly build UI that has a consistent look and feel without having to stop and think.

“If you know <insert underlying technology> then you can just make <higher level, more productive technology>” isn’t a great take

Yeah, I wrote CSS without Tailwind for 15 years. I don’t need it. I’m just 10x more productive with it. If you don’t want to learn new things that’s fine.

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