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Comment by andrewaylett

7 days ago

It's a throwaway comment in the article, but I feel it's important to push back on: HTML is very definitely a programming language, by any reasonable definition of "programming language".

Edit to add: It might not be an imperative language, but having written some HTML and asked the computer to interpret it, the computer now has a programmed capability, determined by what was written, that's repeatable and that was not available apart from the HTML given. QED.

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andrewaylett

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tracker1  7 days ago

How would one do an if condition or enumerate a list in HTML alone? For that functionality you need another language to generate/manipulate the HTML.. not to mention interpreting HTML for display.

HTML is a markup language, it's even in the name... but it's not a complete programming language by any stretch.

  • andrewaylett  7 days ago

    It's not Turing-complete, and as you say, it's a markup language and it's not general purpose. But neither is a necessary component of "programming language".

    • Dylan16807  7 days ago

      Ifs and enumerations are a simpler requirement than Turing completeness. They're an even more basic version of giving the computer logic to evaluate.

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pie_flavor  7 days ago

HTML requires you to understand symbolic representations, where <> means something special. It is more verbose, but no more structurally complex, than Markdown. It does not require you to understand imperative dynamic logic. Getting the hang of symbolic representations is easy, and getting the hang of imperative programming is very hard and most people can't do it. That's why the dividing line is where it is. Making a static bulleted list isn't a 'capability' in HTML if you weren't thinking it was one in Markdown, and inventing your own precisely crafted definition with no purpose other than to include HTML then calling all others unreasonable doesn't convince anyone.