A person I met recently had an argument. It was that a programming language had to be compiled to be considered a programming language. This would make HTML/CSS (unless you're using SCSS or LESS) not a programming language. So, does it have to be compiled?
Does a programming language have to be compiled to be considered a programming language?
programming languages;turing completeness
HTML and CSS aren't commonly considered programming languages, but not because of how they are implemented. They're markup languages, you don't program in them, you only specify content and its presentation. They're computer languages, but not for programming things, so they aren't programming languages. Although recent CSS standards allow some computations (and I think they're even turing-complete) it's not even close to anything the language is intended or suitable for.But that doesn't seem to be the core question. No, compilation is not required for something to be a programming language -- that doesn't even make sense. It betrays a pretty fundamental misunderstanding (any language can be implemented with both interpretation and compilation), and the conclusions to be drawn from that radically contradict the consensus. Whoever thinks that most likely also uses objectionable (though sadly more common, and thus harder to dismiss) definitions of compilation and may draw artificial distinctions such as scripting language/(real) programming language too. It's probably best to ignore their opinion on this topic.