JavaScript is a programming language. But programming language is NOT JavaScript.

Ugh, looking at another JavaScript thread on Tech Twitter somewhat demands me to puke. Not just because of their recycled content, the JavaScript and the overall Tech Twitter web developer community, as promoted by Twitter algorithms, are biased and based often exclusively to DOM manipulation, React, and other fancy tools such as GSAP and Web3.

These people don’t actually contribute to the JavaScript spec at all, or at least help document them over MDN, give comments to those World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s proposals and RFCs, and so on.

Remember Akash which we covered before? Now he’s threading more about freelancing instead of cookie-cutter JS tech tips! And the same goes with the one claiming to “reduce the complexity of JavaScript down to 2%”.

Hence, the modus operandi of these influencer community is clear. They mostly care on two things:

Raising their popularity over Twitter, so those who don’t understand web development can be finally convinced with their overrated skills and products…
…so these influencers can finally gain more pays by hustling more on (frontend) web development freelancing jobs.

I’ve already predicted this way back when I was writing my very first post raising about this issue. But again, these facts do not represent the overall, global JavaScript and web development community. We’re just exposing a subset of them which are often overpromoted and overrated by Twitter’s algorithms, as these mostly-begineer community members, according to Twitter, are the ones worthy to represent the global web dev community.

And of course, as I predicted before, these people have already expanding their wings to the realms of Daily.dev, DEV Community, Hashnode, and Medium.

I’ve been frequently recommended some Hashnode posts written by some Twitter accounts I’ve investigated before, including Suhail Kakar and his April Fools’ Twitter announcement for leaving Web3 for the sake of Google.

Then comes Chris Bongers from Daily Dev Tips, a new developer blog website (first registered in 2020, according to WHOIS data) bearing a familiar icon. Is this the RossDraws of web development or something…

Guess what, that familiar logo invokes another interesting question. Possibly one of the rarely-discussed topic about the representation of the global, developer community.

The </>, the { }, the >_ , and the debate whether “devs” are just only web devs.

You might already recognize these symbols already. However, when I search for stock icons for “code”, I see more and more results representing </> instead of { } and >_ .

Seeing </> here makes me sad, especially when I’m a >_ , a (>_ )! </> represents more closely to markup languages, i.e. the SGML, XML, HTML, and derivatives, instead of “real” programming languages such as Assembly, C, and Python.

Heck, even there’s still some debate whether HTML, as a </> markup language, can be considered as a programming language! Then why is </> still used as de facto symbol of programming, coding, and software development in this entire universe?

(#_ ): calm down, xml is still useful for things!

Yeah, but, SOAP is retired, news and Facebook now no longer cares RSS for the sake of gatekeeping and paid subscriptions, Android no longer recommends defining UI in XML and instead move into Jetpack Compose.

There are still some use cases, though, Microsoft Office, supporting older computers, GTK and .NET stuff (XAML, anyone?) and so, but backend developers now no longer always need to understand </> instead of { }, right?

Now, back to the case of Daily Dev Tips, in which apparently bears the slogan “Daily Dev Tips just for you!”. Imagine that I’m a regular Swift developer who often reads actual Swift tips from Swift by Sundell and Hacking With Swift, only to be presented with this statement: