• UnverifiedAPK@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    Yeah… there are macros to handle formatting. Next you’ll say Scratch isn’t programming either.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      9 months ago

      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.

    • okamiueru@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        If he had said “LaTeX” or “roff”, that might have been a good example of something that blurs the line between the two. They aren’t specifically intended to be programming languages, but with a powerful enough macro system, a markup or typesetting language can be used in the same way as something like Brainfuck.

        • okamiueru@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Absolutely. Those you suggest there are good examples.

          Good enough that, instead of “is/isn’t” programming language, it would be more a “ah, so, how do you define that then?”. Now that I’ve had some sleep, one could argue that I could have been nicer and suggested that approach for HTML as well. After all, it’s just words that mean stuff, and transfer a concept between people, that translate to the same (ish) idea. The moment the latter isn’t the case, it’s no longer very useful for the former.

          Most disagreements, I find, are just cases of different understandings. Discussions worth having is when both are correct but different, and both want to figure out why they differ. So, on second thought, I think I was appropriately rude _

          Both LaTeX and roff are Turing complete, but they are also DSLs with a somewhat narrow “domain”. Sounds exactly right that these blur the lines between what is/isn’t. You could even argue that claiming one or the other is just one way to express how you understand that difference.