He called JSON, Git, and CSV 'languages' so...

I have the feeling he didn't learn programming but was able to copy/paste a small project together.

It's possible that his technical abilities are now sufficient to do the work but he hasn't yet learned the language commonly used for describing the technology.

This is a pretty common thing amongst self-taught people.

As a self taught programmer, I struggled with this for years. I could do the work; understood it; but sometimes I would get terms mixed up. For example: Is it called a method or a function?

Conversely, I've known college taught programmers who struggle with basic CSS so... it's all relative IMO.

For a 4 year degree in CS at many universities, the coursework isn’t that similar to web development, so it’s not surprising that CSS may be a struggle. CS and programming are different things. For example, there are typically several classes on data structures and algorithms. I have worked with and managed self taught, bootcamp, and CS grads, and the CS grads on the level understand how to use dictionaries and lists efficiently, how and when to write recursive algorithms, can quickly write compound Boolean expressions, and seem to have a good concept of runtime complexity and not to write nested loops. Many other examples as well where 4 years of learning the internals of how everything operates and is designed feeds into day to day development.

> Is it called a method or a function?

Allow me to throw a wrench in the works and point out that a lot of the time when people say “function” they mean “procedure”

>I've known college taught programmers who struggle with basic CSS

During my 5 years studying Computer Engineering (BSc, 5 years is the normal amount of time if you don't fail any classes where I'm from), the total amount of time someone taught me CSS was 30 minutes.

Go back a few years and Web Programming would have been an optional class, meaning it could have been 0 minutes.

I don't struggle with css, i just never use it since it's not what we were taught and my job rarely has me poking at it. But if I need to convert stuff or alter things it's not an issue. It's just gonna look sloppy it less than ideal.

But it's css code. You can debug that real time and it doesn't affect the real stuff that my company actually pays me for.

I've never actually encountered a situation where the differences in terminology actually matter (same as sub-routine and procedure), so I'm comfortable dismissing them.

Hi, I am the blog author. This cracked me up! I have to go back and see where I made that goof up! :D But yeah you are probably right - I dont think I am the best software developer out there.

I can definitely code just good enough to cobble up a project together.

Just because my painting isn't good enough (yet), am I not a painter? Who awards that distinction? :) Genuine thought experiment ..

That reminds me of a candidate out of college who said their favorite language was XML because of the pretty colors in the IDE.

I think you are talking about the pie chart image in the blog post? I think "programming languages" is the default tag that Wakatime assigns to any file type inside VS Code.

I took the screenshot from my Wakatime account :)

If you want to learn something difficult it's far more important to get started and do something than to identify the optimal method.