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>Your proposed definition of programming languages includes, as I said, CSV, JPEG, Word, and URLs.

And yet people don't call them "programming languages", while they do call HTML that -- so that even if HTML is not a programming language, there's still a not formally expressed difference that people can intuitively grasp with those other things...

>By contrast, you can't compute so much as a polynomial or NAND in HTML. That is to say, you can't program at all in HTML. So HTML is not a programming language.

You can't program most things in SQL either (not without some modern extensions that make it turing complete), but it is still considered a programming language...

I understand your point that "tt's important to care for semantics in order to have a conversation that conveys information", but I'm of the (e.g. Wittgenstein-ian) school that what matters is not some original/holy definition, but the actual popular usage.

I agree with your fundamental epistemological stance, but disagree with the conclusions you draw.

On somewhat of a tangent, it's fairly uncommon for people to call SQL a "programming language", but you actually can program quite a bit with SQL; even without the recursive common table expressions you allude to, you can do surprisingly complex computations with it, and even define functions in the form of views, as long as they are finite. Certainly neither NAND nor evaluating polynomials poses any difficulty for SQL. In fact, here's an example of arbitrary polynomial evaluation in SQL which works in MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, Oracle, and SQL Server, in this case evaluating 5x⁴ + 2x + 5 at the points 0, 1, 2, and 3:

    select x, sum(a * power(x, e))
    from (select 3 as x union select 0 union select 1 union select 2) xt,
         (select 4 as e, 5 as a union
          select 0, 5 union
          select 1, 2) t
    group by x;

(In SQLite, you easily can evaluate a particular polynomial, or, with a bit more hassle, any polynomial up to some finite degree, but evaluating an arbitrary polynomial would seem to be out of reach without using recursive CTEs.)

Returning to the subject at hand, I have occasionally heard people saying HTML is a programming language. But I think they're just mistaken. Presumably most people at some point thought the world was flat; we shouldn't attempt to explain away their error by saying that they meant something different by "world" or "flat" than we do. Some people think vaccines cause autism; this isn't actually because they're using the word "vaccine" or "autism" in a different sense than we are. They're just wrong. (As for the people who think organic food contains no chemicals, I'm not sure; I think some of them are just wrong, while others are in fact just using a nonstandard definition of "chemical", meaning something like "pure chemical" or "industrially produced chemical".)

In the same way, people are just wrong if they think HTML belongs to the set that includes C, Forth, Smalltalk, Prolog, Fractran, Lisp, Brainfuck, Haskell, VHDL, amd64 machine code, Malbolge, Scratch, Octave, Python, and R, rather than to the set that includes CSV, JPEG, Word, and URLs. Similarly, bash clearly belongs to the former set, and Excel (without macros) and SQL arguably do.

In a lot of cases, they seem to be reasoning based on shallow surface features like the use of plain ASCII text files. (You can see several examples of this even in the thread here, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20906702.) This is similar to the neural network that learned to recognize photos of tanks based on whether the photos had been taken on a sunny day or a cloudy day, or the people who think I'm "hacking into systems" when they see me using a terminal emulator --- an understandable error from the ignorant and foolish, but not one we should allow to confuse our own thinking.

It is an abstract form that outputs something seperate and new. In that sense it is like a recipe or a knitting pattern. The artifact created by execution is distinct from the code. The code itself is valued by that output rather than its own intrinsic qualities. And this ability to generate something seemingly novel is what makes coding cool and useful. You can write a bunch of code and get something that has emergent properties.

The things you mentioned are usually just data. They are the artifact. They are not generating anything distinct. There is only the data.

Everything you said above is true of URLs, JPEGs, and Word documents (which are XML), too, except for the things that aren't true of HTML, namely, "this ability to generate something seemingly novel", and "You can write a bunch of code and get something that has emergent properties." (To some extent that's true of JPEG, but not HTML.) It is not true that URLs, JPEGs, and Word documents "are usually just data. They are the artifact. They are not generating anything distinct," although I concede that it's true of CSV files.

Do people write jpegs and word documents by hand in a text editor?

Your question reminds me of when I first learned it was possible to write programs without line numbers. It took me a while to believe it.

I suppose you don't think programs in Scratch, Flash, or Labview, or output from a compiler, are programs?

If you hand-write your jpegs, I'll not argue if you want to call yourself a programmer.

Man, these job interviews get tougher every year! No, I create my JPEGs with C-x M-c M-butterfly: https://xkcd.com/378/