I'm just graduating with my BS, and I just know general tag usage in html like <img> <video> etc and absolutely no CSS, because I have never made a website or tried to.

My only attempts at javascript were demoing webgl and then I wanted to throw my screen at the wall.

So something like this is nice - I should know how to make web sites, if only to say I know how. Its a good skill.

I completely agree. If I were getting started now, I would probably start learning JavaScript as my first programming language. Along with that I would want to learn HTML and CSS, but to say that most new programmers get started using HTML and CSS as their first languages seems a stretch to me.

All anecdotes aside (I started in HTML and VB, gotta say the VB was more useful to me as someone who didn't go on to be a professional programmer), maybe there's some poll they took to see where people started. Maybe there needs to be. I could see a case where people typically start with a easy-to-grok language like HTML. For one, it's quick to see progress in HTML proficiency.

Well someone should let codeacademy know that HTML/CSS aren't programming languages!

That's absurd. They are a set of rules that dictate how a browser lays out media. That's a programming language to everyone but a computer science purist. The question of whether I can use these layout rules to find the 2,000th digit of pi is totally irrelevant.

I regard them as instructions to be processed by something which can actually evaluate those instructions, like a browser. Writing css and html is no more programming than writing a word doc is. The resulting file has information and layout but it's totally static.

I wouldn't call them a language, and they're the main part of my job.