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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

That's a bit of a one true Scotsman. #\L in "HTML" stands for Language. HTML is a declarative programming language. Programmers have voted with their keyboards and it is not to early to predict HTML's landslide victory.

The reason for it's success is declarative languages are great for data-compression. All the low level gore of reaching across the internet from one remote computer to another is reduced to a pair of <a> tags and a little text.

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Calling HTML a language is OK. But it's generally agreed that the term "programming language" should refer only to Turing-complete languages.

Agreed by pedants. The whole post about spelling mistakes is pure pedantry. When I notice myself caring about such things, I admonish my superficiality.

I know lots of brilliant people who don't write well. If Google doesn't run posts through 10 levels checkers, fine.

Excluding non-turing-complete languages is probably a bad idea technically, as perhaps one wants to promote a toolkit of appropriately-powered languages. (I've seen arguments over "HTML isn't a programming language" before, and really don't care about the of precision when it's unwarranted in the context. Concepts like mathematical functions weren't all that precise until precision was needed.)

De facto evidence that HTML is a programming language is right here on the computer screen. Arguments premised on turning the ought's of should's into is's are collectively considered fallacious. The fallacy goes by a variety of names including "is-ought fallacy", "naturalistic fallacy" and "definist fallacy".

That Turing completeness is a property of some programming languages does not imply that all programming languages are Turing complete or that Turing completeness is an essential property of computing languages. The assumption that the extents of Turing Complete languages are identical to the extents of Programming Languages requires some evidence in support.

Programming languages for describing state machines need not be Turing Complete and their implicit avoidance of the Halting Problem make them useful in practice

Isn't Coq's language, Gallina, not Turing complete (all functions must terminate)? It's still a programming language.

That's an interesting case. HTML appearing in a list of programming languages makes me feel like Google isn't trying very hard to make a good impression on the students they want to recruit. I would feel less that way about Gallina appearing in such a list.

And the HT stands for HyperText and M for Markup, neither of which is programming. If HTML was a programming language, the web wouldn't need JS to be programmed.

Just the same, the HTML output in most contexts is generated by code that someone did program, or deceptively results in.

In terms of things to know, a programmer should know HTML to some extent in this day and age... Requiring a separate bullet point separate from "programming languages" for HTML specifically is absurd, considering the knowledge and concepts are indeed tightly related in the greater context.

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