Markup languages are just declarative programming at its best
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Mostly it's a Word doc with extra steps.
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.
That'd be nice, but it's obvious who is and isn't a programmer in this one.
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.)
So, writing stateless functions, or working in declarative languages doesn't count?
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.
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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.
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.
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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
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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?"
52 down: What you say if you're angry.
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.
So… nested loops. Check.
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What crossword is this?
Pretty sure it's the New York Times crossword
I think that's just some scrabble players angry at all the non-words
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.
The correct answer is <?ph
So the creator of this quiz wants to be someone having their life ended forcefully, 8 letters ...
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