On 13/01/2013 8:17 AM, David Barbour wrote:
>
> In general no. Most user interfaces are not, in any formal sense,
> programming languages.
> To be a programming language you need Turing completeness.
>
> Oh? Eight years studying PL and that's the first I've heard of this
> significant restriction. I better go tell the Agda, Idris, Coq, Funloft,
> Synchrone, and Charity people that they've got it all wrong.
>
> But them SQL guys got it right. SQL's been Turing complete since 1998.
> Oh, and it seems CSS+HTML is also Turing complete (even without JavaScript).
I don't really care whether researchers want to call sub-turing-complete
functions "programming languages." If you don't have universal
computation then it's not a programming language in my book. This is
pretty straight forward and clear cut.
Further, if your program/function is decidable it's not very interesting
from a performance standpoint.
Clearly I'm in the minority, but the line has to be drawn somewhere and
I can't think of a better place to draw it -- unless you want some
watered down definition of "live coding" that pretty much admits every
procedural activity under the sun from deterministic dataflow patching
to musical dice games.
Ross.
Received on Sun Jan 13 2013 - 10:00:11 GMT