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For all intents and purposes, a markup document is a script that outputs a document. There's no point in saying the HTML isn't a programming language. Not all languages have to be general purpose.
The bar for me is whether the language describes an executable program that has state and control flow.
You could perhaps be generous and describe the DOM as a (write-only) state and the parser as a control flow. I don't, personally.
HTML is just a data container format to me. Belongs with the likes of XML, JSON, JPG, PNG, GIF, MP3, MOV, etc.
The umbrella term I'd use for all of these is "coding". That's the skill of understanding structured languages and format specifications, and understanding how you can and can't piece things together to make something coherent. This is a critical requisite skill to programming. But programming is more.
Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow in clever ways to trick funny rocks into computing something you don't know. It doesn't need to be general purpose, but I would argue it indeed needs to have a purpose. It has to be something more than just a pile of declarations you know from the outset. Otherwise it's just structured data.
The umbrella term I'd use for all of these is "coding".
Saying "it's not programming it's coding" is like engineer "it's not dirt it's soil" levels of pedantry that are silly to expect people outside your profession to know.
Hey, maybe you are engineers after all lol
Sure. Which is why I would only make this distinction in a place where I can reasonably expect people to know better. Like, perhaps, a niche community on an experimental social media platform dedicated to programming.
But it’s true.
Coding is, like, the smallest aspect out of all of programming. And unfortunately the part that’s the most fun.
But if you’re a coder, I assume you don’t know how to design complex systems, just (maybe) implement them or parts of them. That’s not what defines programming.
(Disclaimer, in all fairness: that’s in my personal, layman opinion as someone who doesn’t know much theory. I might just be very very in the wrong here, lol.)
Stateless functions still deal with state, they just don't hold onto it. Without state to mutate, a so-called stateless function doesn't do anything.
In declarative languages, your state is the sum of everything you've declared. You don't query results out of thin air. Computational results logically conclude from everything you set up.
HTML ""has state"", as in it has a DOM, but it doesn't do anything with it. You don't mutate the DOM after it's built, or query the DOM to compute results that weren't trivially evident from the state you declared.
You can do those things with JavaScript. But all that proves is JavaScript is a programming language, and HTML is just a data format it can interact with.
Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow
Sure, stateless functions deal with and impact state in some way. If that's what you meant by your previous comment, that's fine, but that's honestly not what would typically be meant by "juggling" state.
The part about declarative languages has nothing to do with state. Declarative languages do not give the programmer control over flow, the other part of your definition.
Learn Lisp, and you will never again be so certain about the difference between a programming language and a data format.
There's no such thing as a pure functional language. All it would accomplish is warming the CPU up. All such languages store data away at some point.
Your statement implies it. Having stateless or declarative functions that never store or retrieve data would mean they are pure functions.
No, my question does not imply a pure functional language at all. Pure functions exist in languages which are not purely functional. Most of the functions I write are pure functions. I could have a workflow where I work with another programmer who handles the minimal stateful pieces, and I would only write stateless functions - would that make me not a programmer?
(There are also purely functional languages, by the way. I just didn't remotely imply there were, or make any claims about them, at any point in this thread, prior to this parenthetical.)
The part about declarative languages has nothing to do with state, or functional languages. Declarative languages are a whole different thing. Of course declarative languages handle state. The comment I was replying to said "Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow". Declarative languages don't involve juggling control flow.
Not really. If so, you might as well consider the stuff you can use to format a comment here on lemmy, as "programming". That's conceptually more similar to HTML as what programming actually is.
quote
some title
Etc.
Yeah.. there are macros to handle formatting. Next you'll say Scratch isn't programming either.
To my knowledge, Scratch can save information away and retrieve it later. That's enough to be programming. There are Theory of Computation reasons for this; it's not an arbitrary distinction.
That's such a weird point to make. Is it because to you, it seems like the line drawn is arbitrary? I cannot imagine any other reason. Certain words just mean certain things.
Markup languages are exactly as much "programming" as you marking a word and hitting "bold". Which is to say, nothing at all. People are wrong all the time, and I have a very limited amount of fucks to give when it happens.
As for Scratch, it is a programming language. So, why would you think it's a logical next step for me to say otherwise? Next, you'll say something remarkably dumb in response. Resist the temptation, and do something more productive.
If he had said "LaTeX" or "roff", that might have been a good example of something that blurs the line between the two. They aren't specifically intended to be programming languages, but with a powerful enough macro system, a markup or typesetting language can be used in the same way as something like Brainfuck.
Absolutely. Those you suggest there are good examples.
Good enough that, instead of "is/isn't" programming language, it would be more a "ah, so, how do you define that then?". Now that I've had some sleep, one could argue that I could have been nicer and suggested that approach for HTML as well. After all, it's just words that mean stuff, and transfer a concept between people, that translate to the same (ish) idea. The moment the latter isn't the case, it's no longer very useful for the former.
Most disagreements, I find, are just cases of different understandings. Discussions worth having is when both are correct but different, and both want to figure out why they differ. So, on second thought, I think I was appropriately rude ^_^
Both LaTeX and roff are Turing complete, but they are also DSLs with a somewhat narrow "domain". Sounds exactly right that these blur the lines between what is/isn't. You could even argue that claiming one or the other is just one way to express how you understand that difference.
If a language can't store information and retrieve it later, then there is a limit to its usefulness. There are problems it cannot solve.
That's OK, because not every language needs to be do that in order to serve its niche, but it's not a programming language.
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As I said, not all programing languages are general purpose. Just because there are problems it can't solve does not mean it's not a programming language.
No. A form can't do anything except send data to a server or get handled in the browser by Javascript (or Typescript or whatever). In either case, HTML is not capable of storing or retrieving anything on its own. It only provides an interface for potentially doing that.
True. Once I was working on a WPF app and someone looked at it and then showed me a simple YAML file they put together for Ansible and legit thought 'YAML was better' and what I was doing was dumb. They considered themselves a programmer.
No. Markup languages are configuration for an interpreter.
inb4 code is configuration for a compiler and binary is configuration for a processor
Actually, there are plenty of interpreted programming languages, for example Perl or Shell Script so that definition is incorrect.
HTML is not a programming language because it only defines form (how things look), and does not control action (executing operations by itself).
The language for Web Development that controls the execution of operations (say: if the user fills a certain field, fetch related data from a server and display it in certain page areas) is called Javascript and is separate from HTML (which existed before Javascript and can exist without it).
Modern Web standards have also moved a lot of the form stuff to yet another language - CSS, Cascading Style Sheets - which is more powerful and reusable, so HTML is more used for the visual structure of the page and less for things like the fonts of the various pieces of text, though it still contains support for that stuff and you can still use it.
I think it's at least fair to say that's the layman's description so it makes sense in the context of a crossword
But also, you're making a computer do what you want, and something that it wasn't programmed by the factory to display, when you write HTML. You're programming.
Fair point. There's a fine line between programming and creating data that a program operates on. I tend to think writing text to produce nontext output is more programming than not.
There are programming languages that are entirely visual. In fact, I could parse the pixels in a bitmap created by ms paint and make it into programming.
It's not even that hard. Assign a set of color values to a character in Brainfuck. Iterate through each pixel and do the translation. Throw away color values that don't match. Run the result through the Brainfuck compiler.
If I'm really crazy, I could implement the instructions directly rather than translating, but translation is easier.
Aaaaand you've now reinvented punch cards for Brainfuck in mspaint. How do you feel about yourself?
@frezik I mean that's literally it's purpose. being a minimal turing complete language.
I could be wrong, but I don't think the creators envisioned it being a basis for easily proving the Turing Completeness of other languages, but it did. They were more thinking "how can I have the most fucked up language in the smallest package and still be Turning Complete?"
By building a simulated Turing machine, usually... or at least by demonstrating that all the components to do so are available.
I mean it's technically turning complete through Rule 110 automata, but it requires user input to advance each step so...
Yep, perfect example! Just because it's technically turning complete doesn't mean it's in any way usable or practical haha
to be fair, the way it's worded I can parse as "a language for web programming", instead of "a programming language for the web"
It’s a markup language. There’s no debugging.
I don’t have to iterate through versions of the markup to find what works.
It doesn’t have specific documentation that is mostly the same but differs slightly on different runtimes
And it doesn’t have IO, dynamic extensibility or modularity….
Wait a second. Hmm… nah, it’s still just a markup language. Just one derived over time that feels like it was the brainchild of Satan and Cthulu
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I don’t have to iterate through versions of the markup to find what works.
<section> or <article> first? A section can contain articles, but articles can have sections.
I'm not a programmer so I'm tending towards accepting HTML as a programming language, because it's a language you type in to make the computer do stuff. Is there maybe another example of something that does what HTML does but obviously isn't a programming language?
Markup language vs programming language is similar to the difference between a font and a typeface. Sure, they're different but to the layperson, they might as well be the same thing.
But a font is an instance of a typeface, so you just mean they're different gestalts? My question was how they're different things.
A PowerPoint, word document or even a text file or picture. There is only a description in the file of what it holds and it's up to the program that reads it, how it will visualize or interpret it.
A word document or PDF would be the closest.
To be fair to PDFs, they can contain JavaScript. Blame Adobe for that and their originally-exclusive-to-Acrobat extension for that.
A word document can also contain a script, as can html pages. It's why I thought these two were the closest match. Nobody is going to call those programming languages.
You mean the code behind the scenes is like HTML? But then I don't see how it's not in a programming language.
No, the html file itself. It just contains elements like a paragraph, image, list, table,... just like a word document.
So you mean for example that typing <p>...</p> is more comporable pressing enter in Microsoft Word? But then you're typing a code instead, no?
Yes, typing <p> in HTML is like pressing enter in word, but that doesn't make it a programming language, it makes it a markup language.
A markup language is also what you can use to format comments here: You use a specific syntax to indicate how you want things formatted.
The separation from a programming language is that a programming language can be used to implement logic, like saying: In the following paragraph, a word should be bold if it contains the letter "A". That cannot be done with a markup language.
A markup language (which is what HTML is) is like an advanced text container. When you write a post or comment here, you can use specific syntax to indicate the size of the text, a hyperlink, a quote, etc. HTML is that. It doesn't "do" anything, you're just writing in what you want it to display, and that is displayed.
A programming language lets you somehow "do" something. Instead of declaring explicitly "write this text in bold" a programming language can be used to process all the text in an arbitrary document, and change the word "aeroplane" to bold whenever it turns up. That is: The output from the code isn't just a rendering of what is explicitly written there, which is what a markup language gives you.
Programmer chuds get bent out of shape that HTML is the single most influential programming language ever made. Think about it, Devs post code snippets to StackOverflow, rendered in HTML. An HTML-interpreter (aka a 'Software Engineer') copy pastes the snippet, transpiles it into a Python file, Java file etc. and later in the process you get a binary.
Basic Brogrammers rage against programming behemoth HTML out of bitterness that all they are is HTML's compiler.
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So the creator of this quiz wants to be someone having their life ended forcefully, 8 letters ...
I searched through the whole crossword puzzle twice before I realized you were mentioning an alternate answer (which doesn't fit in the blank) and not pointing out a nonsense word in the puzzle. 88 across is was, by the way.
Oh, I had no idea Shortyz was forked, I'm so glad there's a maintained version thank you!