I totally hear what you're saying abut the horse analogy: I don't know what I don't know.
What I DO know is that as an interaction designer working with CSS for about 8 years, I can say with some personal conviction that CSS is NOT my bottleneck when it comes to building great software. It has limitations and quirks, like anything else that is reality-based, but it's REALLY powerful for layout in terms of variety and depth of interaction. Add SASS or LESS to your workflow and CSS becomes the bee's knee's so to speak with all the power of functions, variables, arrays, etc...
Everything can be improved, I suppose. However, I've seen poor knowledge of programming concepts in business leadership or toxic office politics dash months of work in an instant. As opposed to fiddly fluid layout issues in CSS. Which any skilled coder can do away with in a few minutes.
Thanks for expressing exactly how I feel about CSS. Especially for mentioning preprocessors - a child comment mentions that CSS lacks abstraction, but in a world with Sass/LESS/etc, and tools like Gulp that make these preprocessors pretty much effortless to use, that's really not a concern any more. Hasn't been for years.
There are things I would like (computed properties like attr()), but things like this don't exactly trip me up: a solution is never more than a few lines of Javascript away.
Also, even if you're not a "skilled coder", there's always Google if you get stumped. The likelihood of you being the first person to have trouble doing [supposedly difficult thing] is close to 0.
It would take some pretty interesting circumstances for me to argue that using raw CSS is a good idea. As I've said before, the language has plenty of flaws, and using plain CSS without a preprocessor would be, in the majority of cases, irresponsible. Sorry for any confusion.
Thanks to CSS not having that from the start, it led to the situation we have today, where there are at least two different preprocessors to choose from: Sass and Less
Having two solutions is worse than having one solution, and we can credit CSS for creating this situation by not having its own.
>>Which any skilled coder can do away with in a few minutes.
I think the skill you're talking about must be skill with CSS. General programming knowledge doesn't help much in a CSS trainwreck scenario -- at least, it doesn't seem to help me.
Basically what you've said is that CSS can be efficient and powerful when in the hands of an experienced CSS expert. That's not an especially good reflection on the design of CSS itself.
What I DO know is that as an interaction designer working with CSS for about 8 years, I can say with some personal conviction that CSS is NOT my bottleneck when it comes to building great software. It has limitations and quirks, like anything else that is reality-based, but it's REALLY powerful for layout in terms of variety and depth of interaction. Add SASS or LESS to your workflow and CSS becomes the bee's knee's so to speak with all the power of functions, variables, arrays, etc...
Everything can be improved, I suppose. However, I've seen poor knowledge of programming concepts in business leadership or toxic office politics dash months of work in an instant. As opposed to fiddly fluid layout issues in CSS. Which any skilled coder can do away with in a few minutes.