Category talk:Non-Programming Languages: Difference between revisions

General approval
(trying to define...)
(General approval)
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:::: Hmm, this requires a definition of ''program'', provided that ''programming'' = ''writing programs''. The traditional definition of '''program''' is a ''syntactically correct, complete sentence in the language''. This gives no way to determine what is a "programming language". Is object code a programming language? In the above sense it is. "Focus on programming" isn't really better, because it itself requires "programming". Maybe "programming" merely refers to certain human activity named so? I.e. "non-programming" means ''not good to be used by a decent programmer'', or ''unusable for software engineering''? But people are programming Web pages in HTML, don't they? Consider a program generator that spits [[C++]] code. Does this make [[C++]] not a programming language? Among three key aspects of a language: 1) application domain, 2) syntax and semantics, 3) computational environment (the target), which one should classify it as programming or non-programming? Or to put it in other words, is "programming" a property of the language or else a way of its use [by programmers]? --[[User:Dmitry-kazakov|Dmitry-kazakov]] 14:31, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
 
I just want to add my gut-feeling upvote for this category. Apparently details need to be ironed out but there definitely are languages here that just don't seem like "programming" languages. SVG is a good example. Its application is too specific to really be considered for general comparison with definite programming languages like C++. Languages like this can be excluded from minimum penetration consideration because they would have too few tasks available to them. XML seems to be mostly about data description and metadata. I'm really not sure how it could be used to add numbers for example. I'm not saying arithmetic is a good measuring stick, but the fact that it's not really designed for that sort of basic thing makes it seem fishy. --[[User:Mwn3d|Mwn3d]] 15:10, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
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I've updated the category page with an attempt to formalize what I meant when I created it.
Anonymous user