[andrewaylett]

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.

[tracker1]

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]

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]

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

[tracker1]

Exactly... it's pretty much what I consider the minimum for a "programming language" is that you need to be able to have basic state and be able to make use of state.

For that matter, it wouldn't take much to get HTML to have those features... though the DOM, JS and even WASM do so well, we don't need it generally speaking.

[pie_flavor]

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.

[Dylan16807]

Please explain how your edit doesn't apply to a .txt file

[zem]

agreed, it's a hill i am very willing to die on too.

[mr_00ff00]

So is Markdown a programming language? Any logic for html, is therefore Markdown as well.

[zem]

sure, it's a dsl for generating formatted output

[Dylan16807]

If we trim markdown to just italic, bold, and underline, is it still a programming language?

What if we trim even further, to just the ASCII control codes? My newline characters make the computer perform a special action to generate formatted output. Is that programming?

[zem]

if we trim a regex down to literal character matches is it still a regex?

[imtringued]

So any text file is a programming language?