It does raise an interesting question as to what we define as development anymore. Do you have to open up a text editor to be a developer? Certainly not if you'

It does raise an interesting question as to what we define as development anymore. Do you have to open up a text editor to be a developer? Certainly not if you're creating views in IOS or even Visual Basic. Is HTML and CSS less "hardcore" because it doesn't have many language features like logic gates and functions? I think the stigma is simply that the barrier of entry for front-end skills is much lower than back-end. Right click on "Inspect Elements", change the background from white to black and you've already gotten a taste for CSS. Change the title of this post to something else and you've got a taste for HTML. Heck, if you really wanted to you could open up the JS console and write an alert statement and get a feel for JS too, albeit a very limited one. But you can't just change the server code to fetch this post, and I think that (plus a full slew of language features) make it much harder to get into, and thus seems more "hardcore".