It's a throwaway comment in the article, but I feel it's important to push back on: HTML is very definitely a programming language, by any reasonable definition of "programming language".

Edit to add: It might not be an imperative language, but having written some HTML and asked the computer to interpret it, the computer now has a programmed capability, determined by what was written, that's repeatable and that was not available apart from the HTML given. QED.

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tracker1 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How would one do an if condition or enumerate a list in HTML alone? For that functionality you need another language to generate/manipulate the HTML.. not to mention interpreting HTML for display.

HTML is a markup language, it's even in the name... but it's not a complete programming language by any stretch.

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andrewaylett an hour ago | parent [-]

It's not Turing-complete, and as you say, it's a markup language and it's not general purpose. But neither is a necessary component of "programming language".

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Dylan16807 an hour ago | parent [-]

Ifs and enumerations are a simpler requirement than Turing completeness. They're an even more basic version of giving the computer logic to evaluate.

	▲	tracker1 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly... it's pretty much what I consider the minimum for a "programming language" is that you need to be able to have basic state and be able to make use of state. For that matter, it wouldn't take much to get HTML to have those features... though the DOM, JS and even WASM do so well, we don't need it generally speaking.

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Dylan16807 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Please explain how your edit doesn't apply to a .txt file

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zem 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

agreed, it's a hill i am very willing to die on too.