[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.

[Dylan16807]

Can you give a clearer definition of when a person "is programming"?

Your earlier definition talked about giving the computer a capability, but that capability just seemed to be displaying a specific file?

Where is the cutoff on the line from HTML to markdown to ASCII? (noting that ASCII uses control codes that trigger special behavior)

[andrewaylett]

Honestly, I don't think there's a bright line. What's the difference between "code" and "data"? It's as much about intent as anything. If my focus is on my content then I'm probably not programming. But if my focus is on getting the computer to do something then I probably am, even if the end result is identical.

I've created any number of empty files in my lifetime, and I wouldn't say that more than a couple of them were programming, but I don't think it's controversial to claim that the IOCCC submission I linked up-thread definitely was programming, and (maybe slightly more controversial) that my deliberate replication of the program when I first heard about it $mumble years ago was also programming?

In your specific example, if someone constructed an ASCII file which made use of the control codes to do something interesting (or even something boring!) then wouldn't that be programming? While typing ASCII into this text field isn't programming because the value of the information is in the human interpretation of the content rather than the machine having interpreted the content as code.

[Dylan16807]

> If my focus is on my content then I'm probably not programming. But if my focus is on getting the computer to do something then I probably am, even if the end result is identical.

But the part that "does something" is the display-txt or display-html command that already exists.

I'd say that even something as small as setting up an alias for "display-txt your_file.txt" can be programming. But I don't see the act of writing your_file.txt as programming.

I don't think the exact example of feeding an empty file to a compiler is programming, even if you think it definitely is. It's playing around with commands to see what they do. It's like buying a box of lego, opening the box and seeing if any are connected already, and then walking away; you didn't build any lego today, you were so close but you didn't. Nothing about an empty file makes it "written in C", even if the intent is throwing a C compiler at it, and you need to be writing C in this situation if you want to say you're programming.

> In your specific example, if someone constructed an ASCII file which made use of the control codes to do something interesting (or even something boring!) then wouldn't that be programming? While typing ASCII into this text field isn't programming because the value of the information is in the human interpretation of the content rather than the machine having interpreted the content as code.

I need an example here.

ASCII art isn't programming.

If you tossed in something to reset your cursor position and made animated ASCII art, I still wouldn't call that a program, I would call that a weirdly formatted video file. And that's really cool but it's cool in a different way. And the value is still in the human interpretation.

If you're going to feed it into python.exe then it's probably code, but that's why originally talking about "programming languages" is a lot clearer. Your programming language in that situation is python. You are not using plain text as a programming language.

If you noticed BEL makes a beep and you use that to make noise or somehow music when the file is dumped to console, I'm not going to say you're using a programming language there either.