Is this a change in the usage of the term “coding”? | Hacker News Reader

Is this a change in the usage of the term “coding”?

3 pointsCarolineW4 comments

Originally as a comment elsewhere, but I thought I'd ask more generally ...

I've been involved with the internet, and its predecessor, for a long time. Before the web existed, "coding" meant writing computer programs.

When the web was invented, and for some considerable time after, writing HTML was not called "coding". It was called "writing HTML". This, of course, preceded the time when pages contained PHP or Javascript.

Now pages do contain programs, or fragments of programs, intended to be executed at serve-time or render-time, and writing those parts of the page are clearly "coding" in the original sense.

Now I'm starting to see people referring to writing plain HTML+CSS as "coding" as a matter of course, even if it has no PHP, Javascript, or similar, and it feels, thereby, that usage has changed. Just as "hacker" used to mean something different and now is used by people at large to mean "breaking into or otherwise doing nefarious things to computers and computer systems", is this a usage that has changed?

Does "everyone" now think of writing HTML+CSS as "coding"?

Please note that I have no skin in the game, and to some extent I don't really care, I just want to know what the current general feeling and usage is.

Thanks.

I think I've been talking casually about "coding" HTML or CSS for many years. To me the word can mean any process of converting your ideas into "computer codes". However, if someone says "I'm a coder", I assume they mean they work with programming in some kind Turing-complete-ish language.

That's always a bit of a dodgy metric, because of two issues: The simpler issue, that people are more likely to bring up, is that you need infinite memory (or, if you're a member of the Church of Church, you need to be able to represent infinite symbols). The tricker problem is that, since all computers are analog while all theoretical formulations are discrete and symbolic, Turing-completeness is a good-enough-is situation. You can't really build a finite state machine or a lambda applicator, so what it means for something to be a computer isn't as theoretically robust as you'd hope. It seems that, in practice, a computer is something a computer scientist regards as a computer (i.e., relative to the things they expect to be able to do with it, and the ways they expect to interact with it).

I say this because of the weird question of whether CSS is Turing-complete. On the one hand, it seems that existing proofs of concept (e.g., [1]) require the user to play tippy bird with key inputs. On the other hand, real digital computers require a clock to play tippy bird with register commits. To what extent does the clocking of a digital computer have to be "out of sight, out of mind" for people to agree that it's a computer? Also, of course, CSS has to enumerate memory positions (i.e., DOM elements), but then a digital computer has to do the same, so the extent to which one cares about infinite memory is put in the spotlight.

[1] http://eli.fox-epste.in/rule110-full.html

If it turns out that someone is indeed constructing logic gates out of CSS selectors, I'll happily consider them a coder.

To someone who isn't a "coder" it may be difficult to tell the difference between someone cranking out landing pages with HTML and CSS, and someone building the checkout flow for a different part of the same app. If you were uninitiated and saw both colleagues working with text editors (with fancy syntax highlighting) and the command line, you'd probably call them both coders. Superficially, the work looks similar. The semantic change you've noticed could possibly be attributed to the tremendous increase in web development in the last decade.

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