Markup languages are just declarative programming at its best
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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For the common folk working with a markup language is programming.
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.
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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.
Yes, markdown is as much programming as HTML.
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.
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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.
Under this definition, using mspaint is programming
Time to add 10 years of programming experience to my CV
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.
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HTML5 + CSS3 is Turing complete, but just basic html is not.
how does something get tested for turing completeness
You port Doom to it.
Or linux.
Just about the only good reason for Brainfuck.
@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.
52 down: What you say if you're angry.
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
It’s a markup language. There’s no debugging
You're not trying hard enough
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.
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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.
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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.
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The correct answer is <?ph
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.
I think that's just some scrabble players angry at all the non-words
So the creator of this quiz wants to be someone having their life ended forcefully, 8 letters ...
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