I agree that the distinction you're drawing is valuable, but it's not a distinction between "code" and "not code": both aspects are defined with a language that the computer parses, interprets, and executes on. One happens to be a declarative language that deals with the
what and
why, and the other an imperative one that deals with the
how.
> Trying to shoehorn peoples attitudes into discriminatory experience levels based on your perception of that rhetoric is an odd behavior unto itself.
I think this is a bit of an overreaction to my words. Referring to someone as a beginner is not discriminatory, we all start as beginners and it's okay to not know things. It's also okay (and desirable!) for those of us who do know better to help novices to learn the material and the culture better than they now do. And the fact is that "what counts as coding" is not a discussion that serious developers have between themselves.
> These topics merit talking about because ultimately they affect how we think, reason, and organize on different layers of projects.
I believe that "code" and "not code" aren't useful categories for dividing up CSS, HTML, YAML, JavaScript, Haskell, and C. We're capable of enough nuance to distinguish between them while still acknowledging that they're all languages which we use to tell a computer what to do. Let's talk about them in that nuanced way, not try to split the world into a code/everything-else binary.