Why is that a better descriptor? I don't understand this desire to demarcate between programming languages and whatever a "syntax" language is. All languages have syntax, even natural languages - it's one of the terms we've borrowed from linguists.

HTML is one of the languages I use when I am programming. In the sense, I really struggle to see the argument that it isn't a programming language, unless someone is using a very precise definition of "programming language" that I'm not privy to. There's a bunch of well-defined stuff it _isn't_ (e.g. Turing-complete), and a bunch of well-defined stuff that it is (e.g. declarative, or a markup language), but as far as I can tell there's no better definition of "programming language" than "language used for programming", and it certainly seems to fit that bill.