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   Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 02:49:01 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

   It's been a few days, with a lot of misunderstanding in replies. That's on me for not communicating my point effectively, so let me expand on and clarify.

   Suppose you encounter "HTML isn't a real programming language" as an example of gatekeeping people out of tech. It's a real and really awful canard that techbros use, even now.

   Very roughly, you can respond in one of two ways:

   • Expand the definition of "programming language"
   • Challenge the idea that programming is necessary to be in tech

   • kuteboiCoder likes this.
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     Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 03:06:54 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Amongst other things, arguing against gatekeeping by asserting that HTML is a programming language just lets the gatekeeper shift the goal posts. "Writing documentation isn't programming," "triaging issues isn't programming," "project management isn't programming," "UI design isn't programming," and so forth.

     I fairly strongly believe that challenging the core assumption is an effective way of cutting that line of gatekeeping off entirely.

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     Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 03:06:55 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I vastly prefer the second approach, as the first one doesn't actually challenge the core assumption that gives the threat of gatekeeping its teeth.

     Also the differentiation between writing a program (very *very* roughly, an executable sequence of instructions) and markup (very *very* roughly the declaration of some data upon which a program acts) is an important one, and I don't think we should let gatekeepers co-opt that distinction to be assholes.

     alcinnz repeated this.