The First Rung on the Coding Ladder: The HTML Debate

Description

A screenshot of a text message conversation on a black background, timestamped 'Today 12:31 PM'. The conversation depicts a beginner's enthusiastic first steps into coding being met with classic developer pedantry. The first person (grey bubbles) announces, 'I have decided to learn how to code,' stating it's necessary for their math major, and that they are 'starting with html.' Their friend (blue bubbles) responds, 'HTML is not a programming language.' The beginner defends themselves with 'its coding,' but then concedes with a hilarious misunderstanding: 'Ok fine ill start with css.' The humor is rooted in a rite of passage for many developers: the semantic debate over what constitutes 'real programming.' It perfectly captures the disconnect between a newcomer's perspective and the gatekeeping tendencies within the tech community, as the beginner swaps one non-programming language for another

Common Tags

Html CSS WebDevelopment Frontend DeveloperHumor LearningToCodeJourney

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Correcting a junior that HTML isn't a programming language is a rite of passage. Watching them pivot to CSS is the universe's way of logging an unhandled exception in their career trajectory

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Correcting a junior that HTML isn't a programming language is a rite of passage. Watching them pivot to CSS is the universe's way of logging an unhandled exception in their career trajectory
Anonymous

I told the new hire HTML isn’t a language; now he’s busy proving CSS is Turing-complete and Legal’s asking if we need to license it as an execution environment
Anonymous

This is like watching someone escape a burning building by jumping into the volcano next door - technically they're no longer in the building, but we've somehow made the situation worse
Anonymous

Joke's on the gatekeeper: CSS with selectors is closer to constraint solving than half the YAML we call 'infrastructure as code'
Anonymous

Ah yes, the classic 'HTML isn't a programming language' correction - the developer equivalent of 'actually, it's GNU/Linux.' While technically accurate (HTML is a markup language, CSS is for styling), this pedantic gatekeeping perfectly captures why beginners often feel unwelcome in tech. The punchline? After being corrected, they pivot to CSS - which is *also* not a programming language. It's the Turing-completeness litmus test applied with all the warmth of a 404 error. Perhaps we should tell them that to truly code, they need to start with assembly, or better yet, toggle switches on a PDP-11. Because nothing says 'welcome to software engineering' quite like immediately correcting someone's terminology before they've written their first 'Hello World.'
Anonymous

Tell a newbie HTML isn’t a language, then spend your afternoon modeling CSS specificity as a nondeterministic finite automaton
Anonymous

Mentor: “HTML isn’t programming.” Reality: our 12k-line global.css has a release plan, incident history, and a bigger blast radius than half the microservices
Anonymous

Math major: 'HTML is coding!' Senior dev: 'Sure, and your proofs handle production race conditions?'
@tercio133 4y

Umm sweaty akchually html+css is turing complete
@SHPR8 4y

Well they aren't wrong. It is coding. HTML and CSS encode what we want the page to contain and look like. These languages aren't programming languages, but the original message said coding, not programming.
@Baksy93 4y

he must try coding in SQL
1. @kitbot256 4y
  
  SQL is Turing complete. Also html5 with CSS is Turing complete, and (lol) being Turing complete is not a necessity for being called a programming, let alone coding, language
@kitbot256 4y

Also I had a discussion recently, a guy tried to convince me that Bash is not a programming language, because its main function is being a shell.
Deleted Account 4y

Technically, programming language - is a set of commands, which can be executed by a computer. And it doesn't required to be turing complete by definition. So as html so and css can be considered to be a programming languages.
1. @RiedleroD 4y
  
  can be considered? Technically yes. Should be? Definitely no. There's a reason we usually differentiate between programming langs and design langs.
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  I mean fuckin yaml is turing complete and it's still a config lang
  
  dev_meme 4y
  
  YAML IS FUCKING WHAT??????????????????
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  another reason to use json
  
  dev_meme 4y
  
  I do
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  I do aswell
  
  @dsmagikswsa 4y
  
  I think json is better too… with strong IDE or editor today, it is more easy to understand the nesting data in json instead of yaml. Such as auto format and highlighting of bracket.
  
  @callofvoid0 4y
  
  wait yaml is a config lang? I never knew that
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  do ppl use it for other stuff as well? I hope not.
  
  @callofvoid0 4y
  
  i thought its a backend programming language because i never have seen code samples for yaml and now that I see json is better
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  bruh
  
  @CcxCZ 4y
  
  I used to use it for pretty-printing data structures and greppable memory dumps. It handles circular references which is practical.
  
  @RiedleroD 4y
  
  omg ew I mean, idk what else I'd use, but still ew
  
  @CcxCZ 4y
  
  As long as you're not writing it by hand YAML is not that bad. Still bog slow because overcomplicated. But among the options of the time (this was around YAML 1.1) definitely one of the more readable options.
@RiedleroD 4y

real OGs use ini files
@affirvega 4y

Wait what json5??
1. @affirvega 4y
  
  Wow it's better
@CHRKSLAYER9000 4y

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The First Rung on the Coding Ladder: The HTML Debate

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