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Category talk:Non-Programming Languages: Difference between revisions
Category talk:Non-Programming Languages (view source)
Revision as of 14:57, 6 July 2009
, 14 years agotrying to define...
(Non-programming = not good to program in?) |
(trying to define...) |
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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)
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I've updated the category page with an attempt to formalize what I meant when I created it.
:A non-programming language, for the purposes of this category, is a language which is not suitable for expressing algorithms to be executed by a computer: they do not have execution semantics (e.g. JSON which is “just a data structure”) or those semantics are directed towards a particular purpose and are not Turing-complete or not intended to be (e.g. SVG which outputs images).
Don't take this as absolute; I'm trying to make, not a distinction out of principle, but a practical distinction for purposes of "what kind of tasks, ''mostly'', will this language be good for?"
It might be a better idea to not have this "negative" category and instead have positive ones, e.g. "Programming language", "Document language" (html, svg, latex, ...), "Data format" (json), ...--[[User:Kevin Reid|Kevin Reid]] 14:57, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
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