A hit on the Bong
Steve - you work in a fictional loft office with wooden floors don't you? Of course you do.
”The New Aesthetic has the ‘scenius’ of London’s Silicon Roundabout to support it. These people are working creatives of Bridle’s generation, with their networked tentacles sunk deep in interaction design, literature, fashion and architecture. If you wanted a creative movement whose logo is a Predator supported by glossy, …
I'm still trying to work out if this Bong person is being serious or this is some work of utter English sarcasm. I'm hoping for the later otherwise I'm not sure it has any right to be on the Register ... or at least not this far past April 1st (which was quite a poor showing this year anyway).
Ok, you can all state that a markup language is not a programming language, but can anyone back that up?
Markup is just a method for coding something, just like recusion is a method. Just because markup is limited to programming how a display appears, doesn't mean that it's not a programming language.
Yes, but no one has felt the need to do so, because it's really only thickos who have a problem with this. The difference, put as simply as possible, is:
In a programming language, one programs, which instruct a computer in how to do something.
In a markup language, one marks up, which instructs a computer in how to draw something.
If what you're doing isn't telling a computer how to draw something, then you can't do that in a markup language -- you'll need to put on your Pull-Ups, climb up in Daddy's swivel chair, and use a real programming language instead.
Clear?
Drawing is a subset of doing.
Every programming language is limited to a subset of the available machine functionality, with the occasional exception of straight machine code. So claiming that HTML is not a programming language solely because it's limited to display functionality* is not the correct answer. Please try again.
* Which is not even true. Many tags (< a >, < script >, < style >, < img >, < form > to name a few) instruct the system to reference external data sources. HTML is supposed to be semantic, not visual, in nature. Just because it's primarily used in visual media doesn't mean it's limited to visual media.
@Chris 3: Way to move the goalposts. As far as I can tell, most of this thread is in response to AC @ 13:35, who did claim that HTML is a programming language; and AC @ 14:47, who wanted to know if anyone could "back up" the claim that it wasn't.
That said, I see from the linked BBC piece that RCJ appears to lump HTML, CSS, and "Javascript" [1] under "computer programming" and "coding", terms he uses interchangeably. Certainly he's not being careful with his technical terminology. So while AC @ 13:19 may have been inaccurate in writing "the Beeb calls HTML a programming language", the accusation is not far off the mark.
Following up on my own post: Some of you may be familiar with Eli Fox-Epstein's demonstration of a Turing-complete machine written in HTML and CSS. Some people argue this shows that HTML5+CSS3 (and I think HTML4+CSS3 - I don't see any necessary dependencies on HTML5 there) is a TC language.
There are a handful of arguments against this. One is that the mechanism in question (an implementation of Rule 110, which in turn can be used to implement a TC tag system by combining stable structures generated by the rule) is infeasibly awkward. But of course feasibility isn't a criterion for formal proof. A better one is that neither HTML nor CSS are TC in their own right, so it's still the case that neither is a "programming language". Another good one is that Fox-Epstein's machine has to be manually clocked: it depends on input from the user for each state transition. HTML+CSS still lacks iteration.[2]
That said, using checkbox state to hold information is clever and does contradict what I wrote about the lack of facilities for holding data. If the IFE machine didn't depend on the user to iterate, it would be a TC machine.
What if we hypothesize a way to add iteration to the IFE machine? Does that make HTML+CSS a programming language? That's rather debatable, too, because the "program" would be expressed as a (very large) series of checkbox input elements. That's not what I consider "written in HTML", and I suspect not what most people would either.
[1] Which, of course, is the name of Mozilla's implementation of ECMAScript, and not a distinct language of its own. But few people care to get that one right either.
> Ok, you can all state that a markup language is not a programming language, but can anyone
> back that up?
Anyone who's learned a bit of computer science can.
HTML cannot express the storage and retrieval of data, which makes it formally less powerful than any language which can do so. Such an abstraction is not just not Turing-complete; it's not even as powerful as a push-down automaton (PDAs are not TC).
HTML cannot express iteration, which makes it formally less powerful than a language that can express regular languages, such as regular expressions.
Those are not a hand-waving distinctions; they are fundamental formal (mathematical) differences which have tremendous theoretical and practical consequences. Anyone who doesn't know the difference between a markup language like HTML and a programming language is operating at a severe disadvantage when commenting on either. It's not impossible for such people to have useful things to say about HTML,[1] but it's not a good position to start from.
[1] I recently wrote a review of a collection of academic essays on HTML [forthcoming in Enculturation], and a number of the authors were, I believe, in this position. That didn't stop them from having intelligent things to say about HTML - but they didn't try to talk about programming.
You're clearly old-school. Satire is for engineers and laughter is just so offline. The Bong plays to the new, post-funny, social humour economy.
Jokes don't need to have punchlines any more, and we no longer have to 'get' them. In the new world, we semantically flag content as funny, and that means it is funny.
(Or at least I hope so, coz if the above is not true then this Bong stuff would appear to be written by someone who thinks they can write funny because they've read the Wikipedia definition of humour)
Most 'programmers' today lack the basics.
To use Bong's example... We don't test because we're too busy writing mash ups to geo code our content..
Now for all those wannabe app developers, how many have written a geo coder ?
Nope they borrow someone else's code. Of course the person who wrote that geo coder had to test their code...
Was Bong trying to show sarcasm and make a commentary about the 'build first and then see if the shit works...' attitude, he missed the mark. The key there is that it's the company's business plan which is crap. Not the code. Build something well, and then see if there is any value to it.
Of course in today's world of the illiterate programmer, anything that kinda works, is considered a good job.
That MAY work if the biggest hardship that comes of your site being down is that the I don't get to tell the world of the tasty fillings in the "deep fill" sandwich I had for lunch which I had to pay full price for because my 20% off IDV (Internet Discount Voucher) couldn't be downloaded (i.e. you're site is REALLY unimportant), but if you're Barclaycard (like in this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/27/barclaycard_offline_payments_down/) you better make sure you have engineers and testers and network guys to get you out of a hole or, event better, keep you out of it in the first place!
This piece doesn't really show how important you are, the exact opposite I suggest.
i remeber as a child nattering away to my grandad all the time and even when i came out with (what i realise now that i am more aware of the world and grownup was some ridiculous rubbish) something that was no where near the mark he would always listen and smile so following his example i am doing the same to this article.
Being old enough to have managed to get a dotcom site off the ground in the last dotcom boom.
It never IPO'd for my billions but its still there trading shares over 10 years later...
I can say that if you want to craft a funny pile of crap from your back room then fail fast and often is great. But at the point that you start trying to build something that is going to last more than a few weeks then you need to think about the structure and the longer term strategy. By the way the post profit economy == BROKE. those servers in Tele-house need revenue to run them so you better start thinking about how your hobby pays the bills (other than EU grants that is..)
90% of your start up time spent on a well written specification document will generate you a well built site in a fraction of the time FFAO will, with the benefit of understanding the growth potential and scalability of what you have built.
Cut the crap and the buzzwords and start working smart.
The real problem faced by Mr Bong is that no matter how hard he tries to be completely OTT with his humour, there are already too many people out there saying this kind of stuff for real. The same kind of people who mistook Nathan Barley for a lifestyle documentary and got confused when they couldn't find anywhere to sell them a Wasp T12 Speechtool.
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I skimmed it this morning so didnt realise it was a joke. In my (poor) defence I got someone else to check the article out to see if it reads as legit and they thought it was too.
It was only this morning I had been telling the office of this guy and his 'coding' skills and his rasberry PI article too.
I am glad reading the comments that I am not the only one who sees how close to reality some of these comments are and took it serious.
Alright almighty engineers: How do you vertically center an item on a page? How do you produce a page that can be read easily by a screen reader? What, if anything, do you have to take into account when designing a page for multiple languages? With regard to SEO are there any web design approaches to avoid? And can you do this in a standards-compliant way and still have it display on IE7?
And, the big question: does it matter for a company like, say, Amazon? If so then it deserves a decent salary, and arguably more than shaving a ms from a robot trading algorithm, despite what some overhypers have to say.
Just because you can bash out a home page in vi doesn't mean you can do it well. But then twenty years ago it was "garbage collection will never be as quick" or you couldn't run a proper server on x86 chips. Snobs, the lot of you.
"who would have an industry at all if software engineers hadn't built him one."
Software engineer? WTF?
You bloody prgrammers would have no industry if it wasn't for proper "engineers" who design and build the hardware :-)
A real engineer knows which end of the screwdriver is the business end and has oil under his/her fingernails.
And as for those people who keep confusing the word "code" with writing a computer programme...get a dictionary. A markup languge is as much "code" as a programming language. Different job, different skill. Debatable whether they are of equal dificulty, but both are "coding" so long as you remember that coding != programming.
Well, I've noticed that CSS is a curious time sink. Back when a colleague and I were building web reporting pages, we did the layout properly using CSS. He's the expert, and I dabbled, but we both experienced the effect whereby any attempt to modify the CSS automatically consumed an entire afternoon minimum. Irrespective of the apparent triviality of the change required.
Odd.
I'll upvote you, but I think you are missing our (coders,admins) point somewhat.
I don't undervalue your skillset. HTML, CSS is easy to write. But quite hard to get just right. I know, I've dabbled in it. Good designers are valuable and arguably a bad designer will produce worse results than a bad coder, whose handicraft may work, but just slowly or in an error-prone fashion.
But, being a designer in HTML is a different skillset from being a developer altogether. When someone says that they want to promote programming and shows off his one-day, shake 'n bake, "programming class in HTML" to prove his point then that really leads me to wonder who decided that particular person was qualified to be an expert on technology.
Flip it around - "we need to promote web design skills so I've spent a day learning Visual Basic". Does that sound clever to you?
Christ. Look, I'm not an HTML guy - I write server-side Java and before that C & Perl on UNIX boxes, and have done since the late 80s. But to disparage HTML/CSS/JS as "not real programming" is a cheap shot made by people who's experience of HTML is undoubtedly limited to a few table tags for formatting. It's moved on. Think learning K&R C from the white book and expecting to understand the Linux Kernel.
I completely agree about your point as a "designer" - I can't design for toffee - but that's not what I'm talking about here. A web team for an outfit like Amazon or BBC will have a design team and a front-end build team, who translate the mockup into HTML/CSS/JS. If done properly it's technical work, with definite elements of software engineering. And I can say that with absolute certainty as I've been extremely well paid to do both.
It's not a "cheap shot" made by "people whose experience of HTML is undoubtedly limited to a few table tags for formatting". I have been a C and C++ programmer on embedded devices and in telecoms. I've also dabbled in DB design, mainly because I'm good at it and I enjoy the nature of the work. And I have also, more recently and because people seem keen to pay me for it, done web development which (along with a fair bit of JQuery, AJAX and such) included doing all the HTML and CSS which was a very great deal more than using a table for layout. I'm already using some of the new HTML5 elements, I can not only position stuff where I want, but I can get it to not break in IE7 either (almost always).
The point of all this? In my not very humble opinion based on having worked professionally both in "real" programming and coding up HTML and CSS, I can tell you that yes, HTML and CSS are indeed easier than actual programming. Quite a lot easier actually.
That's why people who are skilled in actual programming get huffy when HTML and CSS work are called programming. Because they aren't in the same league.
I'm largely in agreement with h4rm0ny here. I'm a programmer (with a quarter-century in the profession) and a computer scientist. I've also worked with HTML since not long after it came into existence. Yes, Cowherd, I've read the specs; I keep local copies of the HTML 4, XHTML 1, and CSS 2 specs (and the ECMAScript spec, but then Javascript [sic] is a programming language) because I refer to them frequently. When I create web pages, they get run through the SGML and CSS validators. I've done academic work on HTML and related technologies, too. I've also used numerous other markup languages, some of which are also programming languages.
So my HTML work goes far beyond dabbling, thank you very much. But I don't confuse it with programming; and I don't think too highly of the opinions of those who do.
How many of the people commenting appearing to not get it are really not getting it and how many are playing along with the joke?
For what it's worth I welcome the arrival of Bong! and the departure of BOFH.
Semi-amusing historical footnote, I remember going to visit a 'VR' company (the company selling WorldToolKit if anyone remembers that) near Old Street station in what is now Tech City / Silicon Roundabout about 20 years ago. They were obviously the forerunners of this brave new paradigm shifting industrial / post-industrial power-house (I think they were are spin off of a company that did software for music labels).
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there was an article on a NZ news website last month complaining that a lot of people were sticking some front-end on a database and calling it "Technology innovation".
I don't think we have exhausted the full electronic engineering component of IT, even though the chips are getting more complex and faster.
Barclaycard site bites pillow, web payments impossible
Zynga shares bite pillow as biz bleeds $85.4m in Q1
Samsung overtakes Nokia, Apple in mobile handjob race
Europe bites seals in air passenger name-swap deal with US
Gigantic lava spirals make Mars ice valley theory bite pillow
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS: Like it or not, this Linux bites
FTC hires hotshot lawyer for Google antitrust probe
Oz court blows away cloud PVRs
My sense of humor was ticked precisely because it's real albeit a bit blown up with a magnifying glass.
Unfortunately a lot of 'start up' thinks they're the bomb and turns out they can't even code properly. You'll find mostly this type of people hanging around techcrunch and other startups for startups types all too often, mixing in and rubbing up the sugar daddies.
Spot on and lmao. Unfortunate that this will hit the nail on the head of the very people it's taking the piss out of.
it's nothing to be ashame of. Those guys contributes to bubble 2.0 which we need to pop.
10/10
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HTML usually gets translated by the browser into C++ or VC++ in microsoft's case, VBscript and javascript require a 'more complex skillset' than HTML and CSS
Real programming would be simillar to Actionscript, ASP, CGI(perl), PHP, JSP --- the list goes on...
you cannot call yourself a true coder unless you know how it interacts with the underlying framework, which alot of coders these days either 'dont care' or 'dont know'... they then wonder why their code doesnt work properly!! (the young and old can be guilty of this)
The "code" that runs TheRegister, facebook, the BBC News or google, would not exist without HTML, as HTML is a prerequisite of the underlying code.
It is a prerequisite because it replaces having to write complicated code to generate a user interface.
Because it replaces having to write the complicated user interface code your self, it is at least as valuable as the equivalent code.
Admittedly, HTML has a prerequisite that you need a browser in order to view the user interface - why? - because it's reliant upon code.
So, HTML is used to call functions, and you can write programs to produce different HTML depending on
A> the results of the functions,
B> the results of the programs
C> the results of the interaction between everything
D> whether or not you have HTCPCP compliant devices attached.......
Is it code? It's certainly time for another coffee..
Mine's the coat with the V for Vendetta mask, as my helpdesk work for the week is over, and now i'm on user interface development for a bespoke customer-facing database front-end instead.
Yes, it's got easier for script-kiddies... but this article is utter tripe.
There's a reason that Angry birds HTML5 game, which is really the cutting edge of HTML5 was programmed in Java in GWT, with a solid testing environment, IDEs and supported various software patterns. Because it makes sense! Computer science, and the necessary leverage that you get from type checking (that enabled GWT) will never go away. This article represents the new ignorance, smugness and self-satisfying rationalization.
The BBC and broadcast media is obsolete now, as far as I'm concerned, this explains how retarded they are on subjects like computing. All my media is now recorded and unscheduled, so broadcast media just seems archaic to me now.
To the people who like broadcast 'media events' like sports matches, get real; I don't judge the modern version of Roman Gladiator circuses of any benefit, given it is just part of the media distraction industry to keep you from think about what is really important, like getting genuinely meaningful entertainment and news, especially seeing all the inconvenient Fnords which TPTB want you to ignore!
All 'Whale Song' money-for-nothing arses need to be mocked, shunned, even fought, defeated, and neutralised, so that we can get back to a genuine robust economy and earned happiness.
If anyone here knows Steve Bong, hit him with this post and Alternate Reality Gambit and quite very reasonably fully expect a novel tech city reaction ........ http://heddinout.com/?p=7026#comment-12329
For some Joining up the Dots. Jointing the Bigger Picture for Mobile Flexibility and Speedy ProAction in Changed Program Projects ...... New World Order Plays for the TelePrompting of Media Puppets Pimping and Pumping Sub-Prime Portfolios.
I understand that the article is supposed to be read "Tounge in Cheek", but anyone who describes HTML as a programming language needs to start writing in assembler. This will teach you the basics of real programming and give you the building blocks and understanding of what is really happing "under the hood",which can then be applied to any other REAL programming language.
HTML, by my definition cannot be described as a programming language as the basics are missing. I.E Branching, Looping and conditionals. As I see it HTML defines the layout and content of a web page. Which in turn is parsed by the browser calling the appropriate real code functions along the way to produce the desired web page.
Ok... I''ve programed in z80 Hex (ie: assembled by hand, programed by switches/keypads), z80 & 6502 assembler, BASIC, pascal, Modula-2, C, C++, Windows batch, Powershell, perl, python and HTML.
HTML is a programming language, it may not be the best, most flexible language, it may be designed for one task, but it's still a programing language. Just be cause it's not a procedural language, doesn't mean it's not a language. You may as well say that you can't have electronic logic gates without a NOT gate, you demonstrably can, they're just not that flexible.
"HTML is a programming language"
Ok, I'll bite. Write the following code in HTML. Just HTML. Not PHP, not Java, not JavaScript, write it in HyperText Markup Language:
set data location 'a' to 2
set data location 'b' to 3
add the contents of data location 'a' to the contents of data location 'b' and store the result in data location 'c'.
Yeah, I should have tried that for the stuff I worked on for gas pipelines, who cares if a misread pressure reading causes a gas explosion... or the travel safety device, the production data for which is kept for 25 years in case of failure leading to a injury or a facility.
Then again, yes I am a has been, didn't do any web tech, but I can still write assembler, no longer in employment, and not getting back any time soon (or ever) it would seem..
Seriously, this dude is da bomb. Nobody else in the entire world-beating UK HTML5 industry is quite so zeitgeistig, so utterly au courant. I could thrive in an incubator like that - astonishing, visionary, and surely an acquisition target to grow and frankly improve DFJ. I need those stock options fieldmarshal Bong!
Is this yet another English joke we mainlanders don't get or someone mistook May for April? Perhaps this is exactly why we don't have the Saturn V, space shuttle or Concorde today, yet we had it 50 years ago. Perhaps this is why there is all this online fraud a garbage all over net. Orlowski 1, Bong 0. You are wrong, live with it.
P.S. If this is how you invest people's pension money, you should be tried, found guilty and jailed in solitary for rest of your days.