Well I guess we’re officially 🎶Back On Our Bullshit 🎶.
There seem to be two camps, as far as I can tell — of course qualified by saying this is my own personal read on things, through my own social lens, which may not be the same as yours — Web Specialists and Javascript Programmers.
I’m defining web specialists as those that pride themselves in their skills at writing accessible markup, expressive styles, and in a mastery of browser quirks and APIs. It’s not that they don’t write Javascript, although I know a few very productive and admirable developers for whom that is the case, but that the other aspects of their skills are closer to how they identify professionally.
I’m defining javascript programmers as those who primarily write javascript on the web and pride themselves on their skill as programmers. A lot of times, especially when expressing negative opinions, the second camp are lumped together as “React Developers”. Not to continue to pick on the above tweet, but even Dan Abramov of React and Redux fame called out the original poster to note that expressing these attitudes in this way deepens a certain reputation the React community has.
While it does seem like these attitudes are particularly popular in the React community, they certainly are not limited to that community. Though as someone who 💖s React, this bums me the heck out that our community has become associated with this manner of expression.
I’ve been both a web specialist who made his bones by bending an inflexible web to his will to create wild and cool web pages, and a javascript engineer who primarily focuses on rendering and scalable UI systems for large apps. I feel like I might have a good perspective by having one foot in either camp and no specific loyalties to either. If you know me from the internet, I wouldn’t blame you if you think I’m firmly in the web specialist category. I speak at CSS conferences fairly regularly, and web animation is near & dear to my heart. But that hasn’t been my job for a few years now, and honestly I have no horse in this “race”. I feel that having been on both sides of this might give me some insight into the circumstances that catalyze this type of negative sentiment.
The tweet with which I opened this post was undoubtedly an asshole thing to say and then, um, double down on for days. But it’s born of a simple and broadly common myopia, where we developers just can’t see past the end of our metaphorical noses, simply can’t envision a world in which people operate in contexts wildly different from our own. I’ve seen countless Javascript programmers express rueful disbelief that people still write HTML by hand without templates, components or a build system. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of rude, shock-horror reactions to CSS-in-JS from the web specialist camp, because they can’t see a world in which such a seemingly over-engineered solution to a simple problem makes sense.
I do think it’s worth noting that I don’t want this post to be an example of both-sides-ism or whataboutism. The Web Specialist community seems — to me — to be markedly more diverse and inclusive, and this might be emblematic of my own personal bubble, but these aggressive, demeaning tones don’t seem to ring out from the Web Specialist community with the frequency they do from the Javascript Community.
This myopia accounts for why we have such frequent, fundamental disagreements, and those disagreements are okay, good even. Without hashing these things out, we’re doomed to stew in our half-blindness, ignorant to the problems encountered and solved by others. It however does — fucking — not excuse being rude, demeaning, condescending, and ableist.
This isn’t a world that needs any more walls.
