Sure. Which is why I would only make this distinction in a place where I can reasonably expect people to know better. Like, perhaps, a niche community on an experimental social media platform dedicated to programming.

But it’s true.

Coding is, like, the smallest aspect out of all of programming. And unfortunately the part that’s the most fun.

But if you’re a coder, I assume you don’t know how to design complex systems, just (maybe) implement them or parts of them. That’s not what defines programming.

(Disclaimer, in all fairness: that’s in my personal, layman opinion as someone who doesn’t know much theory. I might just be very very in the wrong here, lol.)

Stateless functions still deal with state, they just don't hold onto it. Without state to mutate, a so-called stateless function doesn't do anything.

In declarative languages, your state is the sum of everything you've declared. You don't query results out of thin air. Computational results logically conclude from everything you set up.

HTML ""has state"", as in it has a DOM, but it doesn't do anything with it. You don't mutate the DOM after it's built, or query the DOM to compute results that weren't trivially evident from the state you declared.

You can do those things with JavaScript. But all that proves is JavaScript is a programming language, and HTML is just a data format it can interact with.

There's no such thing as a pure functional language. All it would accomplish is warming the CPU up. All such languages store data away at some point.

To my knowledge, Scratch can save information away and retrieve it later. That's enough to be programming. There are Theory of Computation reasons for this; it's not an arbitrary distinction.

That's such a weird point to make. Is it because to you, it seems like the line drawn is arbitrary? I cannot imagine any other reason. Certain words just mean certain things.

Markup languages are exactly as much "programming" as you marking a word and hitting "bold". Which is to say, nothing at all. People are wrong all the time, and I have a very limited amount of fucks to give when it happens.

As for Scratch, it is a programming language. So, why would you think it's a logical next step for me to say otherwise? Next, you'll say something remarkably dumb in response. Resist the temptation, and do something more productive.

Yes, that's exactly what it means.

No. A form can't do anything except send data to a server or get handled in the browser by Javascript (or Typescript or whatever). In either case, HTML is not capable of storing or retrieving anything on its own. It only provides an interface for potentially doing that.