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Discussion on: Should programming languages be made for IDEs rather than humans?

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dmfay profile image
Dian Fay

HTML and CSS also aren't programming languages as such but markup and styling languages (although HTML5+CSS3 are evidently Turing complete if you're willing to put in the effort). But this is actually an interesting point: WYSIWYG markup editors which truly decoupled formatting or visual layout from the semantics of data binding and interaction were a thing in the 00s before everybody realized they were terrible and concentrated on building better plain-text templating languages instead.

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drbearhands profile image
DrBearhands • Edited

HTML and CSS also aren't programming languages

True, but I wasn't suggesting using exactly those. In most languages, a program has a certain structure (rather like an AST, but not entirely). That is the "meaning" of a program. Where HTML has an <img> tag, an imperative program has a while loop.

Indentation, variable names, operators, import statements... those are all styling for humans. You could drop all of them and the language would be just as expressive, but not as readable.