Pineapple on Pizza 🍍
That's right. This is a thing. And people can get pretty fired up about it. Now, as a man that is married to an Australian, I can tell you that Americans are thought, in the international community, to be far too conservative when it comes to fruit on food. For instance, my wife loves pineapple on burgers. She also loves beetroot on her burgers. It gets crazier. But I digress. The point is, she thinks we're all nuts for how little we put on our salads, burgers and pizza. And she thinks we are equally nuts for how much we slather our food in butter and cheeses. She's got a point there. So why, are the likes of Tech Twitter, all up in a tizzy about pineapple on pizza? Truthfully, I have no rightful idea. But I think it speaks to something about techies which I'll get into a bit later. For now, we need to move to another raging debate.
Is HTML a programming language 💾
Here we have another quirky and somewhat silly topic that has engulfed the tech boards of social platforms recently. It's not uncommon to see someone tweet simply "HTML is a programming language" and get one hundred thousand likes and 600 comments either shrieking with joy or brooding with disdain. It's become something of running joke/hot button issue on a lot of platforms. But why? I mean, a quick look on Wikipedia will confirm that while designated as a "markup language", that HTML is not considered a true programming language based on the fact that it doesn't contain programming logic. That said, many have rallied around giving more respect to the markup language as learning it, while not nearly as difficult as scripting languages etc, still requires a certain kind of mind and dedication. So what's really going on here?
Tech people are weird ammiright? 🤷🏻♂️
What really draws me into most of the tech communities that exist on social platforms are the terrific people, the constant drive to push each other, and the off-the-wall personalities.
If you really want to get people fired up, try suggesting that insert library here is total garbage. Then just get out your popcorn and watch the world burn.
I think these debates, as well as many others, come down to one thing. Quirkiness. There is a lot stress involved in working and learning tech. It can be lonely, isolating and generally not conducive to fostering friendships and good relationships. Let's face it, we can often spend hours and hours just staring at screens. The tech or stack we use today can often be changed, lost, or deprecated by tomorrow, rendering our various apps, projects, or labors of love completely useless and broken. So we are usually balancing on a razor's edge of sanity. So what do we do? We joke about either loving or hating putting fruit on pizza (where it doesn't belong) and we wax philosophic on whether a markup language is a real programming language (it's not, but that doesn't mean learning it isn't awesome). All to help us have a little fun and engage in conversations where we aren't stressing about that project that we really have to finish, or that new language that we really need to learn because it's critical to our job. It's a way to connect with other quirky techies while not being too serious or putting yourself out there too much. Sometimes, it's just easier to engage with someone you admire, or follow, or look up to, by joking around with them a bit first. A lot of us just don't have great interpersonal soft skills to say what's really on our mind. We might fear where the topic will go, or worse, we may fear that we'll be found out to be the imposters we believe ourselves to be. Bottom line - don't be too hard on the psycho that tells you they like strawberries on spaghetti or mango on broccoli, chances are, they're just trying to get to know you and expand their network. And that's usually not such a bad thing.