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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I’m skeptical. There are more people writing PHP and Ruby than HTML? And HTML is a programming language? Those two very surprising results make me doubt the others.

Elixir behind OCaml? Possible, I guess, but I know of several large Elixir shops and I haven’t heard much of OCaml in a while.

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Perhaps the people who pick HTML as "what programming language do you use" are a small number :)

A couple of Java programmers from my first job were stopped by police while drinking in a park.

When asked what they do for a living, they said they were programmers.

Then the police officer went:

– Oh, I see. HTML.

> There are more people writing PHP and Ruby than HTML?

Intuitevely I'd say yes.

In most jobs I've been in, the ratio of backend/system devs to front end devs has been from 3:1 to 20:1 depending on the size. Provided I'm on the backend side and would choose companies accordingly, but still.

Even for web first services, there will be a flurry of people who won't touch a line of html/rendering.

But how much PHP code does exist, which does not also produce HTML? I think that's the whole point of most PHP code.

An awful lot.

Imagine a PHP backend providing an API for an app. The only HTML ever produced will be the admin backend, and perhaps auth forms for special cases. The surface of the API will produce objects serialized to JSON, and the vast majority of the PHP will be business logic to talk to external services and do what the service is paid for.

Some might not like the language, but whole businesses will run on PHP, with a dedicated react or next.js frontend that only talks to the PHP via API.

Probably very little. Its either json or html. Most PHP oit there is actually wordpress.

As mentioned, HTML is indeed a programming language. But it’s one that is rarely used on its own. So you could argue that having it as a thing of itself in these lists, makes little sense.

I contest this. It has no features of programming languages: no way to set or read variables, or to evaluate expressions, or any kind of flow control.

If it’s a programming language, so is Markdown. (It’s not, either.)

Take a look at this conditional here:

"(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" is CSS

HTML on its own is not Turing complete, so it’s not a programming language in any practical sense. It’s a markup language.

not sure if that's a good criterion. There are also non Turing complete languages like core SQL or Rocq that definitely feel like programming.

Things can and often do feel like other things that they are not.

There are non-Turing complete programming languages, and there are many things that are Turing complete but have nothing to do with programming (even PowerPoint), so this is neither a required nor sufficient property.

I believe a reasonable way to categorize languages as programming or not is simply.. what is it's primary use case. HTML's last two letters tell us exactly that it is not a programming language.

I think "A language often involved in the process of making computer programs" is way too weak to define a "Programming language". A programming language at least needs to have state/expressions/logic. I'm sure there is a good definition, but if we allow html then any markup is programming and that's obviously false so the line has to be drawn somewhere.

The reason this debate is so strange is because some people think it's gatekeeping to say someone who writes html for a living isn't "programming". It's nonsense.

HTML isn't turing complete

We all live in our own bubbles. I still think Scala is a really popular language!

HTML is a declarative programming language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming#Domain...

Nah. It’s a declarative language, but not a programming language.

To prove me wrong, show an HTML program that does any kind of computation whatsoever.

There’s not one. It’s not Turing complete. I doubt it’s even Turing partial. It’s a markup language, not a PL.

Where does this idea that a programming language has to be Turing complete come from? As far as I can tell from cursory searches, the most broadly understood understanding of a programming language is a formal language for directing computations on a computer. HTML does this, CSS does this, and SQL does this. Frankly even configuration languages like YAML or the spare INI file do this in the proper context.

Can these languages do everything or even most computations you would be interested in doing in a computer? Of course not. But why should the definition be restricted to languages that can do everything?

Your definition is overly broad and makes everything a programming language, at which point the term isn't useful anymore.

But Turing completeness is also too broad. Otherwise Power point animations and Conways game of life are programming languages.

I will take this over HTML

Yes. So a criteria that is below Turing Completeness but which wouldn't make markdown a programming language. Shouldn't be _that_ hard to find such criteria. E.g. "Has some form of logic/flow control". Can perform computation/"execute". etc.

I mean, CS is famously bad at exact definitions [1]. Why should we have one for what a PL is? Just do what humans have been doing for millenia, how is it commonly used. A tomato is a vegetable from a culinary perspective, and HTML is not a PL based on its use case and its literal name.

[1] what is a low or high level language? Strongly typed language?

Is CSS included in the HTML, if so then it is turing complete, maybe? See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2497146/is-css-turing-co...

If HTML is a programming language, why not SVG? If SVG is a programming language, why not PNG? Is your image viewer just an interpreter executing PNG code? Maybe being a programming language is a spectrum...

Yes, if you go down this road then the equivalence of code and data means that everything is a programming language.

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