• Bob@feddit.nl
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    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?

    • CapeWearingAeroplane@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      8 months 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.