> I think it would be a bit embarrassing if you were a web developer, and had to npm / bower a library to avoid writing trivial flexbox CSS.
Why does everything have to be this huge library to be used? Why can't I pull in 30 small libs that composed? I'm a Node.js developer, our ecosystem is built around small focused modules that do one thing and one thing well. Sometimes you can write the 1 line yourself, or pull in a module and know that if anything changes that could affect that line of code, someone somewhere will notice it before you and update the module. Congratulations you just saved yourself hours of debugging because someone else did it for you.
Libraries always are a trade-off between the flexibility of developing it yourself versus the time saved relying on other people's work. To me, it's less the size of the code than the functionality that matters. Code size is not necessarily an indicator of how hard it is to solve a problem after all.
In this case, however, we are talking about pretty basic CSS. There are some standards for page layout, but there is no One True Way to design a web page front end... all designs are different. Small CSS like this (as a library) in effect make design decisions for you and I don't think CSS is difficult enough for this to be justified.
As an example (without manually editing the CSS at least, which defeats the point of the NPM / Bower installs), this grid CSS locks you in to arbitrary divisions of 12. What if your grid requires 5 evenly spaced columns? You can't do that.
> I don't think CSS is difficult enough for this to be justified.
YOU don't think it is. Neither does my buddy who works in CSS/SASS, but I do. Because I don't do styling. I'm mostly a backend developer.
> What if your grid requires 5 evenly spaced columns? You can't do that.
I just did it easily by 5 elements and putting them as `-fill`. 5 evenly spaced columns. I wouldn't have been able to do that without this lib because I don't know CSS that well, nor flexbox. This library just saved me tons of time, just to do what you said it can't.
Why does everything have to be this huge library to be used? Why can't I pull in 30 small libs that composed? I'm a Node.js developer, our ecosystem is built around small focused modules that do one thing and one thing well. Sometimes you can write the 1 line yourself, or pull in a module and know that if anything changes that could affect that line of code, someone somewhere will notice it before you and update the module. Congratulations you just saved yourself hours of debugging because someone else did it for you.