> HTML is somehow simultaneously paper and the printing press for the electronic age. It’s both how we write and what we read. It’s the most democratic computer language and the most global. It’s the medium we use to connect with each other and publish to the world. It makes perfect sense that it was developed to serve as a library—an archive, a directory, a set of connections—for all digital knowledge.<p>Ah yes, journalist word salad.<p>No, HTML is not a programming language. We all know this. The definition of programming is: "creating a sequence of instructions to enable the computer to do something" - which HTML does not do. Defining HTML as a programming language is like defining a plain .txt file as a programming language. You can open it in your browser, the computer is "running" it, but it's not doing anything. The underlying rendering engine of HTML is what's doing the work rendering your markup.<p>I suspect this is the author trying to quell his cognitive dissonance at not knowing how to write code for actual programming languages. Perhaps it's his ego invoking that fear... "I don't know something I want to know, so I must rationalize something I do know as being more than it is."<p>I suppose it's a good article for engagement - for journalist types to send to each other to feel better about their lack of knowing how to write code, and for developers to chuckle.