this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Programmer Humor
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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
You're not trying hard enough
<section>or<article>first? A section can contain articles, but articles can have sections.So… nested loops. Check.
The combination of HTML and CSS is considered Turing complete since at least March 2011.
CSS is doing a TON of heavy lifting there
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.
To be fair to PDFs, they can contain JavaScript. Blame Adobe for that and their originally-exclusive-to-Acrobat extension for that.
A word document can also contain a script, as can html pages. It's why I thought these two were the closest match. Nobody is going to call those programming languages.
You mean the code behind the scenes is like HTML? But then I don't see how it's not in a programming language.
No, the html file itself. It just contains elements like a paragraph, image, list, table,... just like a word document.
So you mean for example that typing ... is more comporable pressing enter in Microsoft Word? But then you're typing a code instead, no?
Yes, typing in HTML is like pressing enter in word, but that doesn't make it a programming language, it makes it a markup language.
A markup language is also what you can use to format comments here: You use a specific syntax to indicate how you want things formatted.
The separation from a programming language is that a programming language can be used to implement logic, like saying: In the following paragraph, a word should be bold if it contains the letter "A". That cannot be done with a markup language.
Okay, I follow now. Thanks for your patience, ha.
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.
But a font is an instance of a typeface, so you just mean they're different gestalts? My question was how they're different things.
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.