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Angry programmers noise getting louder and louder
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Programmer Humor
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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.
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.