I have to admit that my first thought was “April’s fool”. But you are right. It makes a lot of sense (if they can get it to work well). Not only is Excel the world’s biggest “programming language”. It’s probably also one of the most unintuitive ways to program.
This is already a feature in an app called MacroFactor. But there is definitely room for improvement in the field.
One thing that I miss in MacroFactor is that it should have some memory of my previous choice.
Example:
If I take a picture of a glass of milk, it always assumes it to be whole milk (3.5% fat). Then I change it to a low fat milk (0.5% fat). But no matter how many times I do that, it keeps assuming that the milk in the photo is whole milk.
As mentioned, HTML is indeed a programming language. But it’s one that is rarely used on its own. So you could argue that having it as a thing of itself in these lists, makes little sense.
There are non-Turing complete programming languages, and there are many things that are Turing complete but have nothing to do with programming (even PowerPoint), so this is neither a required nor sufficient property.
I believe a reasonable way to categorize languages as programming or not is simply.. what is it's primary use case. HTML's last two letters tell us exactly that it is not a programming language.
I think "A language often involved in the process of making computer programs" is way too weak to define a "Programming language". A programming language at least needs to have state/expressions/logic. I'm sure there is a good definition, but if we allow html then any markup is programming and that's obviously false so the line has to be drawn somewhere.
The reason this debate is so strange is because some people think it's gatekeeping to say someone who writes html for a living isn't "programming". It's nonsense.
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