I keep noticing those of us in the frontend field being treated much the same as nurses, paralegals, and executive assistants. Our work is seen as important, certainly, but just not the same as, or as important as, the “real” work.

An interesting read. Of course just an personal opinion as the author said, but I think he is correct in lots of his points.

I noticed that I think / feel like this myself sometimes, even while I’m a frontend dev myself.

Fortunately I’m in a nice team that values my frontend skills that all the other full stack/ Backend devs are missing.

Did you notice this bias / devaluing of the frontend work yourself?

  • @AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
    4•3 months ago

    I’m a scientist, and “Not a real programming language” gives me big vibes of arguing that a thing is a science (usually economics) because they’re using “is a science” as a proxy when they actually mean to say that their field is important and valuable.

    I’ve dabbled enough with CSS that I know how much I don’t know, and I don’t think respect for a skillset is (or should be) measured by whether a thing is a “real programming language”

    • @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
      3•3 months ago

      You cannot write a program in CSS. It is not a programming language.

      Look:

      Computer science precisely classifies things that are almost computers.

      There’s a hierarchy that has nothing to do with clout. It’s a genuine field of study. It’s even one of the freaky ones where the landmark name isn’t a computer scientist, but Noam yes-that-one Chomsky. The linguist.

      We say a type of machine recognizes a language. Famously, “you can’t parse HTML with regexes,” because regular expressions are a specific grammar that does not allow self-reference. Added regex features like lookahead only extend it into context-sensitive grammar.

      I’m pretty sure HTML is even less than that. This comment sent me sixteen Wikipedia tabs deep to double-check, and I started drinking around number eight. But I feel confident saying you also could not parse a regex, with HTML. Even the delightful wackaloons who get Powerpower to act Turing-complete could only half-ass it out of HTML by including CSS and a human hitting tab-space-tab-space.

      It’s not a value judgement, when we say CSS and HTML are not programming languages. And we’re not just being pedantic toward you. Again: have you seen what we say about Javascript? This is how we are.

      • @AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1•3 months ago

        To be clear, I’m in agreement with you that CSS and HTML are not programming languages and also that saying that isn’t a value judgement.

    • @lysdexic@programming.devEnglish
      2•3 months ago

      I’m a scientist, and “Not a real programming language” gives me big vibes of arguing that a thing is a science

      CSS is not a programming language. Neither is HTML.

      This, however does not take away from its importance or the skillsets and expertise required to use it effectively.

      What a weird belief: thinking the value they bring to a project is tied to whether they use programming languages or not. The majority of people working with programming languages are already bad at it. Why is it being used as a badge of honor?

      Is this a “living in glass houses” scenario?