I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I think whether people are hung up on it depends on the context. I haven't looked up the thread from the tweet in the post, but I can make some prejudicial assumptions about it based on the style and who got tagged in. That makes it look gatekeepy. A similar comment on a different thread might not be.
I want to take it down to a contrived litmus test:
If someone said they wanted to be a robotics engineer, and wanted to start out with an easy programming language and asked for suggestions... well, I don't think anyone's going to go with HTML or CSS.
Not because there're better alternatives available. Most of use would discount them because they're not the same type of language we all associate with programming things; we'd certainly bring them up if the asker was interested in making a website for their robotics project.
So I think it's not cut-and-dried. Depending on the scenario they are or are not "programming" languages, and as long as people aren't using that distinction to put other people down, then whichever definition's ok.
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I think whether people are hung up on it depends on the context. I haven't looked up the thread from the tweet in the post, but I can make some prejudicial assumptions about it based on the style and who got tagged in. That makes it look gatekeepy. A similar comment on a different thread might not be.
I want to take it down to a contrived litmus test:
If someone said they wanted to be a robotics engineer, and wanted to start out with an easy programming language and asked for suggestions... well, I don't think anyone's going to go with HTML or CSS.
Not because there're better alternatives available. Most of use would discount them because they're not the same type of language we all associate with programming things; we'd certainly bring them up if the asker was interested in making a website for their robotics project.
So I think it's not cut-and-dried. Depending on the scenario they are or are not "programming" languages, and as long as people aren't using that distinction to put other people down, then whichever definition's ok.