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?
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.
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.