Html is a programing language

HTML is a programming language

Every now and then we read debates that HTML is a programming language, that it isn’t a programming language. I don’t understand the point of the debate. It seems to come from a group of people that want to gatekeep who gets to be called a programmer. In any case, having this debate without defining what we understand as programming language makes no sense. So let’s look into that. The canonical source when it comes to programming language classifications is Jean E. Sammet 1969 book Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals. She was an early computer pioneer, where she helped design COBOL among other programming languages. She was the first female president of the ACM so that says a lot about her career impact in computer science. In that book she provides a couple of defining characteristics for programming languages. Let’s see if HTML meets them:

Machine Knowledge Is Unnecessary

In this case «a programming language requires no knowledge of the machine code by the user». The user shouldn’t learn about registers, how numbers are represented by the machine, and so on. This doesn’t not mean, as Sammet clarifies, that the programmer cannot learn about these characteristic of the machine in order to write better programs, is that it is not required to know them to use the language. HTML meets this characteristic.

Potential for Conversion to Other Computers

From the previous characteristic we can derive the second one. If the user can ignore the machine in which the program is going to run, a programming language thus must be able to be ported to different machines. Programming languages should be machine independent as Sammet says. HTML meets this characteristic. It runs in every browser in most modern computers out there.

Instruction Explosion

In this case when the program is translated to machine code, each statement in the program should produce multiple machine code instructions. Also says Sammet, the user doesn’t need to write any of this machine code for their program to work. HTML meets this characteristic.

Problem-Oriented Notation

«A programming language should have a notation which is somewhat closer to the specific problem being solved than is normal machine code». So instead of doing:

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Html is a programing language

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Is HTML a Programming Language?

Developed by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1990s, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is one of the most widely used programming languages — a cornerstone of the World Wide Web. More often than not, you interact with it every time you jump into your web browser and surf the internet. It plays one of the most crucial roles in developing web applications, web pages, and website designs.

While its significance has never been in question, it remains the topic of the programming community’s seemingly endless debate: Is HTML a programming language or not?

It should be an easy answer, right? Well, it isn’t so simple. This isn’t a rigged dichotomy that provides a clear-cut answer. It’s difficult to come to an absolute conclusion as to whether it is or isn’t, so let’s start with what a programming language is.

What is a Programming Language?

Computer programming languages are made up of a series of letters, numbers, and symbols that allow developers to construct a detailed set of commands and instructions that a computer can understand and carry out. These languages let computers quickly and efficiently process large and complex volumes of data. Like the numerous human languages that exist, there are a vast array of programming languages that coders use to communicate with computers.

Computers are designed to think in binary, which is the 10010100011101011 language you may have seen in movies like The Matrix and AI films. Programming languages translate the strings of 1s and 0s into something humans can understand. And each programming has its distinct features, although there are many commonalities among the field.

Knowing what a programming language is will help shed light on the ensuing argument. Now that you have the short and sweet definition of a programming language, let’s talk about HTML.

What is HTML?

Since the inception of the internet, HTML has been at the heart of what makes the World Wide Web tick. It’s a coding language used to create pages that a web browser is capable of displaying. In this boundless electronic universe we live in, the majority of web pages are stored as HTML files. Websites are a collection of related HTML pages stored on a server.

As you peruse the internet, each page you find yourself visiting is requesting an HTML file stored on the server. The browser will then dissect the HTML and present it the way you expect it to.

The term “hypertext” refers to the text embedded with links that readers can click and relocate to a different section of a page or another page entirely. At the same time, “markup” is the language that uses tags or plain text with special markings to define the sections of a page. If you’re curious as to what it looks like, right-click and sift through the language in the pop-up box on the right of the page.

HTML does not work alone. Along with HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is another core technology for building web pages. HTML and CSS make up two of the most important aspects of what you see on a webpage. Whereas HTML is responsible for text and pictures, CSS sets the visual properties such as colors, layout, and format.

So, if HTML plays a role in dictating how we see a webpage, wouldn’t that mean it’s a programming language?

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Html is a programing language

Technically, HTML is a programming language. In fact, HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Whether or not HTML is a real language is a matter of semantics, and not terribly important.

What is important, though, is to understand that HTML — and CSS, for that matter — are quite different than most other languages, and that it’s difficult to get a big picture of what coding is like from those two languages alone.

How are HTML and CSS different than other languages?

HTML and CSS are declarative languages. That is, they are basic statements declaring what should exist on a web page. Here’s some sample HTML:

 
This is the headline within this section.
 
This is a paragraph within this section.
 
 

Basically, the above HTML says that this webpage should contain a section, and the section should contain a header and a paragraph. There isn’t any sort of computation — it’s a simple statement of fact. This is what I refer to HTML as a declarative language.

Similarly, here’s some sample CSS:

The above CSS says that all paragraphs on the webpage should have text that is red, a size of 12 pixels, and should be aligned in the center. Again, there’s no computation — it’s just a series of simple declarations.

While HTML and CSS are declarative, most coding is computational — and it’s what most other coding languages are designed for.

Here’s some computational code that calculates the average of a list of numbers:

list = [5, 2, 10, 8, 9, 4, 7] sum = list.sum average = sum / list.size

This code, instead of making declarations, is performing a series of computations in order to achieve an end result. The first line initializes the list of numbers. The second line calculates the sum of all the numbers in the list. The third line computes the average by dividing the sum by the number of items in the list.

The vast majority of coding languages involve writing computational code. Computational code isn’t always mathematical in nature, but it’s code that creates functionality. While HTML and CSS are declarations about what should appear on a web page, computational code is what makes stuff happen. Adding an item to your shopping cart, shooting a bad guy in a game, deleting an item from your spreadsheet — these are all examples of functionality, and are accomplished through computational code.

The reason why this distinction is important is because many people begin their coding journey with HTML and CSS. And while that’s a fine place to start, it’s important not to jump into a new career based on your experience with those languages alone. It’s premature to assume you enjoy coding and, say, sign up for a coding bootcamp, if you’ve only had experience with HTML and CSS. To truly know whether you’d enjoy coding, you’ll want to have some experience with a classic, computational language, as most programming jobs are primarily about writing computational code.

If you’re deciding which computational language to try first, check out our blog post on that topic here.

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