[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?

[andrewaylett]

I would say that a "language" is a necessary component of a "programming language".

An empty file was an IOCCC winner: https://www.ioccc.org/1994/smr/ but you need to interpret that empty file as C source in order to reasonably claim to have programmed the computer.

My reasoning comes more from the other direction: someone who writes HTML is programming therefore HTML is a programming language.