11
Aug
Can we all agree that “Programming Language” := “Turing Complete”
I’m tired of articles like this one that say things like
XML essentially is a programming language that allows users to customize the underlying format of their word-processing documents
It peeves me a lot when people refer to things like XML and HTML as “programming languages” because there’s no actual programming (i.e. control flow of execution and conditional statements, to start) involved in using them. They’re document or data formats, and that’s it. HTML is as much a programming language as a typewriter is a computer.
I hereby propose that we stop using the term “Programming Language” to refer to anything that’s not turing complete.
We can also ask google what it thinks about the matter…
Sure, you’re right, XML/HTML are markup languages not programming languages. But non-CS folks get thrown off because the last L stands for language (they ignore the M), and any language used by computers must be a programming language, because, well, “you type a command and it makes the computer do something, right?”
But HTML can subsume Javascript and Javascript is Turing-complete, so…
Dude, this is the internet. I don’t think we can agree on anything.