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The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend (joshcollinsworth.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/webdev
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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"

[–] lysdexic 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 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.