10mo ago

Angry programmers noise getting louder and louder

84 comments

Markup languages are just declarative programming at its best
- 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.
  
  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
  Ooo hyperlink
  Etc.
  
  If a language can't store information and retrieve it later, then there is a limit to its usefulness. There are problems it cannot solve.
  That's OK, because not every language needs to be do that in order to serve its niche, but it's not a programming language.
- No. Markup languages are configuration for an interpreter.
  inb4 code is configuration for a compiler and binary is configuration for a processor
  
  Actually, there are plenty of interpreted programming languages, for example Perl or Shell Script so that definition is incorrect.
  HTML is not a programming language because it only defines form (how things look), and does not control action (executing operations by itself).
  The language for Web Development that controls the execution of operations (say: if the user fills a certain field, fetch related data from a server and display it in certain page areas) is called Javascript and is separate from HTML (which existed before Javascript and can exist without it).
  Modern Web standards have also moved a lot of the form stuff to yet another language - CSS, Cascading Style Sheets - which is more powerful and reusable, so HTML is more used for the visual structure of the page and less for things like the fonts of the various pieces of text, though it still contains support for that stuff and you can still use it.
- 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.

HTML5 + CSS3 is Turing complete, but just basic html is not.
- how does something get tested for turing completeness
  
  You port Doom to it.
  
  @jackpot @KittyCat implementing a brainfuck interpreter for it is a useful method
  
  By building a simulated Turing machine, usually... or at least by demonstrating that all the components to do so are available.

52 down: What you say if you're angry.

to be fair, the way it's worded I can parse as "a language for web programming", instead of "a programming language for the web"

What crossword is this?
- I can only conclude it's Satan's crossword
- Pretty sure it's the New York Times crossword

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.
- I'm not a programmer so I'm tending towards accepting HTML as a programming language, because it's a language you type in to make the computer do stuff. Is there maybe another example of something that does what HTML does but obviously isn't a programming language?
  
  A PowerPoint, word document or even a text file or picture. There is only a description in the file of what it holds and it's up to the program that reads it, how it will visualize or interpret it.
  A word document or PDF would be the closest.
  
  Markup language vs programming language is similar to the difference between a font and a typeface. Sure, they're different but to the layperson, they might as well be the same thing.
  
  A markup language (which is what HTML is) is like an advanced text container. When you write a post or comment here, you can use specific syntax to indicate the size of the text, a hyperlink, a quote, etc. HTML is that. It doesn't "do" anything, you're just writing in what you want it to display, and that is displayed.
  A programming language lets you somehow "do" something. Instead of declaring explicitly "write this text in bold" a programming language can be used to process all the text in an arbitrary document, and change the word "aeroplane" to bold whenever it turns up. That is: The output from the code isn't just a rendering of what is explicitly written there, which is what a markup language gives you.

The correct answer is <?ph

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.

So the creator of this quiz wants to be someone having their life ended forcefully, 8 letters ...

Uh... WASM?
- I searched through the whole crossword puzzle twice before I realized you were mentioning an alternate answer (which doesn't fit in the blank) and not pointing out a nonsense word in the puzzle. 88 across is was, by the way.

Forkyz ❤️
- Oh, I had no idea Shortyz was forked, I'm so glad there's a maintained version thank you!

If you create data with the intention for that data to be used with a program then that data becomes a part of that program and you are therefore programming when creating that data.
- So writing that post was programming?

84 comments

some title