Languages and HTML

Created Thursday 24 September 2020

When people think of..

COMPUTER LANGUAGES.

(though I'll modify this a bit)

What is programming?

Changing your screensaver
Writer/Word
Calc/Excel
HTML/CSS
Bash
PHP/MYSQL/Javascript
Python/Perl/Ruby interpreted/scripted
C compiled
Assembly (00 4E A3 77 8C 0A etc)

On classic "Languages"

A few things 95% of languages have in common:

- Written in plaintext (there are exceptions)

A few things 95% of languages have in common:

- this is important to remember:
Written BY humans FOR humans.
Most everything you see isn't some weird computer artifact: it's a choice.

A few things 95% of languages have in common:

- Punishingly difficult and picky syntax.
(One character wrong and the whole thing explodes*)

*But not HTML or CSS!

Things people debate about over languages:

• Human readability?

• How do you "run" it?
  • Compiled/interpreted/ or scripted?

• "Paradigm?" What's the language's main "style?"

• What was it originally designed to do?
• How does it get changed?
• What does it do now?

Many of these boil down to: SIMPLE vs EASY

Or, I should probably say, a particular couple of ways to
redefine SIMPLE and EASY.

SIMPLE: (Think "command line")

• Few assumptions
• You can see "everything"
• Usually text-only
• Rigid Framework
• "Mathematical"
• Few abstractions - simple data types.
• Programmer must be MORE verbose,

and use MORE language to get things done.

EASY: (Think "iPhone" or "Siri")

• Many assumptions
• A lot is hidden to simplify the view
• Not always text-only
• Multiple Pre-Loaded Frameworks
• "Visual"
• Many abstractions - simple data types.
• Less language to get something up and running.

Recap

Simple like a Command line =
"Unfriendly, but a great deal of power and possibility through simplicity"

Easy like Siri /Alexa =
"Friendly, lots of complexity, but it only lets you do like seven things" ☺

Before I descend into more "classic language" stuff

Consider, e.g. Excel, which many would call
the best computer language ever created,
and perhaps a very good balance between
Simple and Easy

Human Readability

Old school - Human readability is not important

• Short abstractions are concise and thus quicker
• Forced whitespace is limiting
• There should be MANY ways to do a thing

Human Readability

New school -Hey, looks like human readability is at least a little important:

• Multiple people working on projects
• Older code needs to be understandable
• There is value in forcing people to do things only one way

"Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

"Important" real life Categories.

(these are fuzzy and non-exclusive)

Procedural/Imperative ("default")

Do things step by step

Important "real life" Categories.

Functional

Turn it into straight up math. No variables, no
"procedures"

Important "real life" Categories.

Object Oriented

Everything uses an "object" metaphor.
("Black Box Approach")..

Important "real life" Categories.

Declarative:
Uncommon, because very hands-off.
You don't say "how" - you just tell what to do over a limited set of possibilities.
(This is HTML and MySQL, and increasingly a lot more things..)

e.g. YAML is used to define things. This is EASY (not SIMPLE)

Examples of classic languages

C
Rust
Go

- Low level, Compiled, Native

Examples

Java
Python

(Midrange, Python's honestly probably the best all around, let the fights begin)

..And then the holy mess that is the web.

Here goes: This ONLY makes sense if you remember that the web grew and accreted on itself, and encouraged to do so primarily by "market forces"...
as opposed to "designed."

Text

Plain ol' text. BBS and the like

HTML

"Lets make this look better than the Matrix, SEMANTICALLY"

CSS

"Still kind of ugly, now let's go VISUAL"

Okay but we need interactivity...

OKAY, how about, lets just reach into the computer and run random programs

cgi-bin

This actually worked for a while when we were oh so innocent...
..but honestly, i think we've come full circle.

Server-Side

PHP.

Click a menu and get back some generated HTML. Cool!

Combine with MySQL for even more power!

Client-side

uhoh.

"Okay, so we want things to move around. And maybe more..."

Client-side

We've got this thing people are using to literally make cartoons...
..so I guess we're going to use it for EVERYTHING.

Flash

Javascript

Clearly, we can do better than Flash. I mean, we could slap that together in a weekend and name it something similar to something that already exists because okay

Javascript part deux

Okay, maybe that wasn't a great idea...

but too bad, here we are.

More on HTML

DECLARATIVE - so it won't break.
SEMANTIC - describes WHAT THINGS DO, not HOW THEY LOOK

HTML Versions?

Important things to know:

HTML 4.0

:aka XHTML Decided to "formalize" the language, meaning that badly written HTML would fail and break...

HTML 4.0

:aka XHTML Decided to "formalize" the language, meaning that badly written HTML would fail and break...

...yeah just kidding that'll never work

HTML 5.0 -

No more formalization.

integration with JS, more media stuff. Mostly a good deal.