From: Tayssir John Gabbour
Subject: Re: E. W. Dijkstra VS. John McCarthy. A rebuttal to Paul Graham's web writings.
Date:
Message-ID: <cfmr5c$dlh@odah37.prod.google.com>
Jeff wrote:
> Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> > Tim Josling wrote:
> > > Actually Basic (VB) is the dominant language, according to the
stats
> > I
> > > have seen.
> >
> > I'm pretty sure HTML is.
>
> How can HTML be considered a programming language? It is nothing more
> than a data storage format that happens to be human readable.
I see it as a declarative way of commanding the machine to do something
useful. It is a "language" and the person coding in it expects a
reasonably predictable range of results from writing certain
statements.
Of course, I'm open to people having different mental conceptions of
"what is a language?" But after having learned lisp last year, I've had
my mind opened to what a language is. Most "programming languages"
aren't themselves seriously programmable within the language, so I feel
if I include Java as a language, I'd include HTML as well.
And when you use XML with Python in a data-directed technique, which
could have been simulated by just writing extra Python code, the lines
blur. Our conception of languages as these discrete things... how much
is it for our benefit, and how much for tools salesmen?
Is it conceptually important for me to bar SQL from the pantheon of
programming languages for not being Turing-complete?
MfG,
Tayssir
--
Bruce Lee's teachings fit in nontrivially with programming!
http://www.dreamsongs.com/cgi-bin/ExtravagariaWiki/index.cgi?NontraditionalLiterature