← Back to context

Comment by jveld

11 years ago

To me, the defining feature is automation. A "programmable" system is one where smaller actions can be composed into larger ones and saved for invocation later (by name, in response to some event, etc). I don't know much about photoshop, but judging from what people have said, it seems to meet this definition.

I will concede that "programming," in the sense of "I've been programming for the last couple hours" or "He isn't very good at programming" implies the use of a Turing complete language. Photoshop would probably fail here, along with more programmer-y things like writing html.

I have read elsewhere that programming is giving the computer instructions. So clicking the close button on a window or typing into a word processor is technically programming (although it is not coding). My search-fu was unable to find that though.