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To be clear, it is •not• the case that being hard is what makes something programming.

I mean, if this is some kind of social hierarchy pissing contest about who’s “technical” and who’s doing “real work” and whatever, then yes it matters. But being hard isn’t what makes it programming.

The question is: what’s made the CSS hard?

- achieving design goals with the available building blocks
- dealing with unexpected semantics
- balancing reuse with abstraction overload
- testing across devices and contexts
- adjusting scope and goals based on implementation difficulty
- preventing and detecting breaking changes, esp in distant code
- taming complexity
- maintaing clarity about larger goals while in the technical weeds

I could go on.