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Angry programmers noise getting louder and louder (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[–] 3 points 2 years ago* (11 children)

I'm not a programmer so I'm tending towards accepting HTML as a programming language, because it's a language you type in to make the computer do stuff. Is there maybe another example of something that does what HTML does but obviously isn't a programming language?

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (7 children)

    A PowerPoint, word document or even a text file or picture. There is only a description in the file of what it holds and it's up to the program that reads it, how it will visualize or interpret it.

    A word document or PDF would be the closest.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    To be fair to PDFs, they can contain JavaScript. Blame Adobe for that and their originally-exclusive-to-Acrobat extension for that.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (4 children)

    You mean the code behind the scenes is like HTML? But then I don't see how it's not in a programming language.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    No, the html file itself. It just contains elements like a paragraph, image, list, table,... just like a word document.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    So you mean for example that typing ... is more comporable pressing enter in Microsoft Word? But then you're typing a code instead, no?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yes, typing in HTML is like pressing enter in word, but that doesn't make it a programming language, it makes it a markup language.

    A markup language is also what you can use to format comments here: You use a specific syntax to indicate how you want things formatted.

    The separation from a programming language is that a programming language can be used to implement logic, like saying: In the following paragraph, a word should be bold if it contains the letter "A". That cannot be done with a markup language.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Markup language vs programming language is similar to the difference between a font and a typeface. Sure, they're different but to the layperson, they might as well be the same thing.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    A markup language (which is what HTML is) is like an advanced text container. When you write a post or comment here, you can use specific syntax to indicate the size of the text, a hyperlink, a quote, etc. HTML is that. It doesn't "do" anything, you're just writing in what you want it to display, and that is displayed.

    A programming language lets you somehow "do" something. Instead of declaring explicitly "write this text in bold" a programming language can be used to process all the text in an arbitrary document, and change the word "aeroplane" to bold whenever it turns up. That is: The output from the code isn't just a rendering of what is explicitly written there, which is what a markup language gives you.

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