> Get rid of treating things differently, make everything the same and make everything work with everything, code should just be data.

"Code should just be data" doesn't imply the converse, though; there's arguably utility in having data that isn't code, even with the premise that code should be data.

> Just because one of the most widely used declarative languages start adding conditionals doesn't mean the whole world is turning upside down.

The question still is: why is CSS becoming a programming language? And who decides on this, anyway?

A gentle reminder: conditionals aren't new to CSS; @supports and @media are conditionals; so are style queries.

if() just codifies behaviors and hacks [1] developers were already doing.

[1]: https://lea.verou.me/blog/2020/10/the-var-space-hack-to-togg...

If only Lisp had better presense in modern code editors. Emacs is not enough, especially on Windows where it is super slow. I think this is what actually stops newcomers to start with Lisp and not Python

Yeah, code is data, data is code. Every Lisp programmer knows that.

>> Just because one of the most widely used declarative languages start adding conditionals doesn't mean the whole world is turning upside down.

You need to look at a large terraform project.

> > The distinction between code, config and data is being erased.

> As as lisp programmer, I love it.

You make bad engineering decisions because you consider the advantages, but not the disadvantages. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29231493>

- Visual Studio project files are XML files that are interpreted line by line, and can contain variables, branches, and loops. Hell on earth.

CMake was never declarative AFAIK?

CMake today is effectively an eso-lang / Turing tarpit with some “modern” declarative conventions that people try to push.

One reason I still love Ruby so much. It gives ability to easily define a DSL within a larger robust fully fledged language, and you can always tap on the larger ecosystem if needs evolve. This is a sharp contrast with starting something small from scratch (which might seems fine at the start), and later be on your own to scale things up as needs grow.

People love to hate on Maven's XML but at least it's been mostly the same since 2006. There are conditionals in profile activation expressions but they are very limited by design. Declarative done right, IMO

What's the old adage? Software expands until it can send email?

> All these started with pure declarative DSL then incrementally created a nightmarish imperative monstrosity.

"Huh?" I asked myself when you mentioned that Terraform is now imperative somehow. Took a look at the website again, and seems to still be HCL, and still be declarative. Am I missing something? How exactly is Terraform today a "imperative monstrosity"?

I think cmake kind of needs conditional checks though.

There is no recursive program that can't also be created by adding in more conditionals. It's turtles the whole way down.

not as much as you would think, the if statements don't really affect the css crimes scene because pretty much everything was already possible before

You can blame whoever invented the word "if", as soon as you can branch based on data you can just write an interpreter that turns data into instructions, no matter the architecture.

FWIW, you can make software that runs on Harvard architecture chips. They feature distinct address spaces for ROM and RAM. It's been a while, but it's how Atmel/Microchip AVR micros work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architecture

That said, I'm unaware of any programming language (outside assembler) that takes that split to heart in a higher-level way.

von Neumann did not invent the von Neumann architecture. Not even a little bit.

If you want to reason that the hardware is at fault, you should be blaming the Eckert-Mauchley architecture.

Not really, most of these configuration as code systems are not executed directly on the CPU but rather interpreted in which case a separate data-only memory would not stop anyone.

It was shocking the first time I showed a lisp program to a (particularly "annoyed by everything") non-lisp developer who never apparently saw s-expressions before. Lots of knee-jerk reactions of "Oh my god so many parenthesis" and "How could anyone program like this?" while they sat there smug with their TypeScript codebase having more special characters, syntax and the same amount of parenthesizes, only because the opening parenthesis is one symbol to the left, instead of in the middle of the calls...

OP is not being very precise (and in a way that I don't think is helpful). There is nothing imperative in an if expression. Declarative languages can be Turing complete. Declarative languages are a subset of programming languages.

Wishful thinking? Maybe they are tired of all this and want to make something good again, and so the cycle continues.

If you can mostly stick to the declarative way, it's still a benefit. No Turing-complete language completely prevents you from writing "bad" code. "You are not completely prevented from doing things that are hard to understand" is a bad argument. "You are encouraged to do things that are hard to understand" is a good one (looking at you, Perl).

> So why do people still design declarative languages?

Cost.

If money were no object, you would only hire people who can troubleshoot the entire stack, from React and SQL all the way down to machine code and using an oscilloscope to test network and power cabling.

Or put another way, it would be nice for the employer if your data analyst who knows SQL also knew C and how to compile Postgres from scratch, so they could fully debug why their query doesn’t do what they expect. But that’s a more expensive luxury.

Good software has declarative and imperative parts. It’s an eternal tradeoff whether you want the convenience of those parts being in the same codebase, which makes it easier to troubleshoot more of the stack, but that leads to hacks that break the separation. So sometimes you want a firm boundary, so people don’t do workarounds, and because then you can hire cheaper people who only need to know SQL or React or CSS or whatever, instead of all of them.

It’s the cycle of newcomers to <field> looking at the existing solutions and declaring “this shit is too complicated, why did these morons design it this way? Check out my DSL that does everything and is super simple!”

Then time passes, edge cases start cropping up and hacks are bolted on to accommodate them. Eventually everything struggles under the weight of not having loops, conditionals, etc. and those are added.

After some time, the cycle begins anew.

>The amount of hoops I had to jump through to get things to print properly on paper...

Anybody know how that compares to Report Definition Language?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/reporting-services/rep...

Seems like an awfully scattered shitshow just to arrive at a typical "What You See Is Not What You Get" result.

And this one is made for printouts.

Agreed. This has come up multiple times during my job. It's gotten to the point where we had a microservice running that spun up selenium and printed the dom and then sent that pdf back to the front-end all just to make consistent print outputs. I've read tech blogs of others doing just that too so it's not uncommon.

Unfortunately the test set of wpt does not have the capability to cover printed matter so relief isn't coming any time soon

You can do without javascript. Checkbox `:checked` + `label` trick for toggling states still works.

See: https://codepen.io/abdus/pen/bNpQqXv

If we've learned anything from the history of CSS, JS and the semantic web it is that 99% of the time a feature will be used in ways that were not intended. There is no reason to suppose that this will be any different.

How hard would it be to have a response header that tells the browser "don't display anything at all until we ask you to from JS when we're ready"?

Considering the kinds of crap that have been done with headers...

Well, historically, styles were first in JS (JS StyleSheets in Netscape 4.0) and were pulled out into CSS. – This is an old man card! ;-)

There is no HTML5 other than a buzzword: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/introduction.html#is-this-h...?

That's the same as regular css variables unfortunately

    padding: 1em;
    padding: var(--padding);

With no fallback value that resolves to padding: unset if the variable is not defined. The only ways I know of to work around this are style queries:

    padding: 1em;
    @container style(--padding) {
      padding: var(--padding);
    }

Or cascade layers:

    @layer base {
      padding: 1em;
    }
    @layer override {
      padding: var(--padding, revert-layer);
    }

>On the contrary, a lot of the reason CSS is confusing is because it's full of insane hacks people have to do to get the behaviour they want.

CSS is confusing because the vast majority of web developers never learned it properly. Many developers won't learn any "new" CSS (like CSS Grid which shipped in all browsers in 2017) beyond the hacks they learned in the '90s and early 2000's.

That's not the fault of CSS.

I wish the "little more power" would add CSS modules. It would also be great if web components didn't require Javascript and could be configured with pure HTML and CSS.

I will kiss the feet of the whatwg groups if they do this.

PS: Would also love to have declarative template inclusion now that removal of XSLT has also removed this facility from the browser.

CSS is Turing complete :-) You can find pure-CSS implementations of Game of Life, for instance.

You write your markup in an xml syntax, your scripts in a C syntax, and your styles in a lisp syntax... a perfect trio.

All hail the embedded Scheme interpreter to apply Style transformations!

Although I feel like we've already explored this with XSL. The XML syntax was perhaps too much to swallow.

I don't know what "semantic HTML enrichment" means, but there wasn't time. The alternative was VBScript and DHTML. DHTML and Netscape's DOM forked Web content based on `if (document.all) /* IE code here */; else /* netscape code here */`, and only with Firefox, Opera, and Safari founding whatwg.org and start HTML5 did we unify everything.

> They just need to start deprecating and removing old features.

That's not going to happen.

They can't break millions of websites by removing old features. Besides, for the most part, current developers can ignore most of the old stuff.

But a site made in 1997 has to render on current browsers.

Yeah. Font-size and width, be gone!