Previously: All Programming Languages Are Interpreted
On Friday, my spouse solicited some assistance with her job by asking me
Do you know HTML?
To this, I responded almost nonsequituresque with
All programmers know HTML.
I promptly assisted her with her task, which involved writing a template email message using HTML. She picked up on the syntax quite quickly, correctly inferring the roles of the <html>, <body>, <p>, <br>, and <font> tags. As her job mostly involves writing and maintaining her own Excel spreadsheets filled with custom formulas, I already considered her to be a programmer. She also regularly plays an online dragon breeding game called Flight Rising, which for trading purposes has a forum that uses phpBB's BBCode to format posts. That she quickly grasped how to open and close HTML tags, which tags signified what, and how to debug bold text that overran—she initially omitted the slash in what she intended to be the closing bold tags—was not a surprise to me.
Play Flight Rising in Your Browser
The extent of my assistance was to encourage her to use paragraph tags instead of manual line breaks, and to show how anchor tags worked for creating hyperlinks. Even without an explanation for how the tag worked, she was able to understand where to put the target URL and where to put the link's text.
Still, my initial response continued to ring in my head. Do all programmers know HTML? That was an assumption, possibly caused by clumsily assuming my own experiences are universal. So, I began to wonder: Do all programmers know HTML?
My hypothesis was that almost all programmers know HTML to some extent. They'll roughly know the syntax, they'll know common tags for structuring semantically-sound documents, and would have no trouble reading existing HTML code.
As mentioned in the previous article, I ran a poll on Mastodon asking respondents to identify whether they are programmers and whether they can write HTML code.
Initially, I was going to ask respondents to place themselves in one of three groups
I opted instead to word the poll like I was populating a Venn diagram of "programmers" and "knowers of HTML" for two reasons.
The first is that the wording would have been simpler, and Mastodon's default limit of 4 options covers all possible locations within a two-group Venn diagram (membership in both groups, membership in group "A", membership in group "B", and membership in neither group).
While I believe that knowing how to write HTML is enough to consider someone a programmer, the reality is that the culture of software development is somewhat elitist toward HTML in particular due to a belief that a markup language "doesn't count" because one can't use it to encode logic. I anticipated that certain respondents who know HTML but don't consider themselves to be programmers might've looked at a poll with my initially-conceived set of responses only to incorrectly conclude that the poll wasn't about them, and wanted to make sure they had a place.
In other words, I added an option for people to specifically identify as non-programmers who know HTML because I wanted to be able to capture the group who would (in my view incorrectly) not consider themselves to be programmers. That's right, the option which suggests that HTML is distinct from an imagined "real" form of programming exists specifically so I could include everyone who knows the language in the programmer population.
The poll ran for 24 hours, was boosted (which is Mastodon-speak for "retweeted") over 300 times, and accrued a total of 2,680 responses. The results:
Before talking insights, I just wanted to rattle off a handful of weaknesses in this poll.
I don't even know how to control for some of these weaknesses, let alone fully grasp the nuanced ways they may mislead the interpretation of results. With that said…
Even excluding the population who know HTML but don't consider themselves programmers, it's clear most programmers know HTML. Correctly including anyone who knows HTML in that population simply amplifies this truth. I will proceed with the assumption that my hypothesis is true.
However, this is not the interesting insight in play.
Mastodon is an unpopular social media platform populated largely by all kinds of misfits, from unsocialized young queer folk to opinionated and abraisive personalities to socially-conscientious social rejects to lots and lots of ADHD and spectrum-y interests. It is not representative of the general population, and—assuming the respondents are an accurate sample of the overall Mastodon userbase—this poll's results give a pretty big clue as to why.
In Mastodon terms, it is rare to see 300 boosts on a post by someone who isn't a celebrity like famed Star Trek star George Takei or former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. To have over 2.5k respondents to a poll is in my experience also quite large.
It's always possible that the poll did not sufficiently escape confinement from a potential "programmer bubble" but that would imply that the over 300 people who boosted the post are all programmers with largely programmer followings. I find that difficult to believe. The poll and its responses were specifically worded so anyone would meet one of the four response criteria. I have no reason to believe that the poll wasn't widespread enough to get the attention of true non-programmers in a way that is representative of Mastodon's user base, and they were clearly included as a possibility in one of the poll's responses so I doubt such potential respondents would have felt the poll was not for them.
The idea that 90% of Mastodon users know HTML to some extent, and that over 90% know how to program, is absurd. Unhinged. Obscene.
It also makes sense.
Mastodon is decentralized. If they're anything like me, people seeking social media resistant to the "enshittification" (a technical term) inherent to corporate offerings—and who are technically-savvy enough to understand that a scam like Bluesky is lying about being decentralized—will be attracted to Mastodon due to the way it was built, even in the absence of existing social connections on the network. In my case, only a single-digit number of the people I follow on Mastodon are folks I know in real life. The poll's results are remarkably consistent with the idea that a significant number of Mastodon's regular users are folks who prefer to use social media that they—through technical knowledge—know is much less likely to exploit them.
That Mastodon hearkens back to an age of a less centralized Web might also explain why a significant amount of its users know HTML. Knowledge of HTML was a significant part of participating on the Web around the turn of the century, and it's reasonable to think that those who have been around long enough to recognize when and how a platform will "enshittify" might possess residual knowledge of HTML from a time when it was more necessary to know—even when these people otherwise do not program.
A poll with a longer duration might've produced different results. I genuinely did not expect it to take off the way it did, though in retrospect I can try to come up with reasons to explain why that happened.
The poll opens with the phrase "Testing a hypothesis," without clarifying what said hypothesis was. I think this is catnip to anyone who is science-minded; I presented a poll to which anyone could meaningfully respond without outright stating what I was trying to measure, which may have driven curiosity. Responses to an in-progress poll on Mastodon are only visible to respondents; I think that the interesting distribution of responses—which emerged very early in the poll's life—may have surprised some who participated. Those surprised at the preliminary results could have suspected that it had not reached a wide enough audience to be truly representative of Mastodon's population, and may have boosted the poll specifically to elicit more responses from non-programmers.
To those aware of the elitist backlash against HTML among a certain subset of dedicated software engineering types, the specific wording that separated "HTML" from other forms of programming may have seemed interesting. I received some replies that correctly informed me that writing HTML is itself an act of programming, though none took the leap to accuse me of divisiveness. They seemed to wisely give me the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming malice on my part—perhaps waiting to see what I had to say—which I appreciate.
Excluding anyone who self-identifies as a programmer, the number of people who know HTML is nearly triple those who do not. That alone is a fascinating figure and—continuing to assume I reached a representative sample—leaves no doubt in my mind that Mastodon is a very peculiar social network. Including programmers in the analysis paints a very clear picture about the type of person willing to regularly use Mastodon. If you're a socially-conscientious programmer who is unafraid of being a social pariah, I think Mastodon is definitely the place for you.
I received a few replies from folks who are not programmers wondering if they had a place on Mastodon. I believe they do and I believe it is important for people without a technical background in software to have a presence there. Mastodon almost certainly benefits from the presence of users with vastly different backgrounds from the norm. People willing to tolerate being surrounded largely by computer touchers will likely be valued for their relatively unique insights among the technologically-minded. Which is to say, Mastodon absolutely has a place for folks who aren't techies and I would go as far as to claim that it is in need of them.
Despite this population demographic however, I hesitate to suggest that the number of software developers on Mastodon is itself a bad sign or a sign of irrelevance among general populations. Many online social networks got their start catering to a specific niche before growing to include a wider mainstream. That programmers seem attracted to Mastodon is an indication that it has technical merits as a social network, and my own observation that these programmers tend to be prosocial suggests that Mastodon also has merits as a space specifically to connect with others. It has long been my suspicion that Mastodon's userbase can be explained by these factors, and I now have some evidence to support that view.
If you're a regular reader of this blog and aren't already on Mastodon, consider joining.