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The question of whether CSS is a programming language serves only one purpose: to demote those who write it.
There is no confusion that needs to be clarified, and no other purpose in asking, beyond the most trivial kind of pedantry.
The debate itself is an act of gatekeeping, whether intentional or not. Its only significant effect is to elevate some work over other work, despite their essentially identical nature.
The only meaningful function of the question is segregation. #css
@collinsworth Very well put.
@collinsworth yeah, that’s pretty clear at this point. All these things are clearly languages from the mathematical perspective, and they’re all instructing a computer to do something, so they’re programming languages. There’s no technical merit to argue otherwise. And no one benefits from distinguishing one from another, except as you say, for gatekeeping
@collinsworth Lots of things are accidentally Turing complete. That doesn't mean any sane person would write algorithms or data structures using them.
@collinsworth I don’t know if this is the right strategy. Pedantry is pretty deeply engrained in software culture, and it’s shouldn’t be the status as a programming language that determines the worth of work done with it. If you build a building or cook a meal those aren’t less valuable because they’re not programming languages. When I make a nice spreadsheet and someone tells me it’s not a programming language they’re right, and I’m confident I used the right tool for the job.
@collinsworth Very much this. Yes!
@collinsworth yeah, nobody should care about this question. There are people that are good at working with CSS and others are good at working with JS, and others are good at working with C++, and they should be just considered alike.
@collinsworth People are paid well to write CSS. And they should be, because it requires knowledge and experience to do it well. Respect anyone who takes the time and effort to learn a skill.
@collinsworth The whole thing is resolved through the terms ”general purpose programming language” and ”domain-specific programming language”. There seems to be a weird double standard with CSS though. People aren't weird about SQL the way they are about CSS.
Hopefully it'll pass, I still remember people deriding users of scripting languages like Python/Perl/JavaScript/etc with not being real programmers but scripters, but that's rare to see these days.
@collinsworth I find it curious that those gatekeepers usually don't have deep understanding of how CSS works.
@rebeccafinn @collinsworth I’ve noticed that “don’t know much about it” is part of it. From their POV, it’s got silly and weird rules and is inconsistent and “could be done better some other way” so why would they learn it? They dipped their toe in, said “jeez this sucks” and quit. It’s part of their argument.
Is it a language?
Does it instruct the computer?
Then it is a programming language!
And #css is a language that instructs the computer how to style the webpage so it’s a programming language.
@collinsworth then again, by arguing that CSS is a programming language, one accepts the framing that somehow that would make it better. Perhaps CSS is a language for designers. Perhaps some programmers find it hard because it's so close to design. Perhaps programming problems aren't the hardest problems in software development.
@collinsworth
I write in CSS and I have a history of believing people who falsely undervalue me, but - with that said - I thought the reason CSS isn't considered programming is because it (mostly) controls aesthetic rather than action, so you can't use it to tell a computer to perform complicated tasks, but rather how to look while tasks are being performed. Obvs not a perfect description but hopefully you follow what I mean. Comments?
@independentpen The distinction being made here was summarized by another commenter as general purpose programming language vs. domain-specific programming language, and I think I like that way of putting it. It's a much more accurate and useful division than the blunt binary of programming/not programming—especially because what one is doing when one is writing CSS is, unavoidably, programming, i.e., authoring imperative instructions for a computer to execute.
@collinsworth I run into this sort of thing all the time as a back end developer, only their favourite technology is correct, it's such snobbery, makes me want to puke, #css is a fine language and those that know it's intricacies and interactions with the various browsers are great developers
@collinsworth it's weird how people who encode instructions into Turing-complete systems have decided that what they do is the only "programming", even going so far as to carve out exclusions for The Bad Ones That Doesn't Count like MS Excel. Programming just means performing the actions necessary for a device to perform a useful (?) function.
Are you writing Erlang on your programmable rice cooker? Tail recursion on your programmable remote?
I didn't think so.
@collinsworth in that context, of course writing CSS is programming.
Oh it doesn't count if the behaviors you're invoking were predefined by the device manufacturer? So we all implement the floating point division algorithm now? Or even have a vague idea of how it works? Or at least its time complexity... right?
Oh, no, we just wrote `/` between some numbers? Like some kind of MS Excel user? Pitiable.
@collinsworth It's way more complicated than a programming language.