why

Why hasn't /prog's look been updated since 1997? Does it even use CSS?

Ironically, /prog/ is one of the harder boards to create a standalone client for.  I wrote an ncurses client for the imagereddits (which sucks and is read-only, plus I never got the image-displaying code from w3m to work just right, so I never published it), and the formatting almost took care of itself - replace <br> with a linejump and transform the text coloring for spoilers and quoting. For enhanced BBCODE, it would would be extremely painful to try and deal with sub/sup, and aa would be a nightmare.