What is the difference between learning HTML and learning a programming language?

Question

I learned HTML and CSS about 8 months ago, and recently, about 2 months ago, I started learning Python and Ruby. I find it much more difficult / time consuming to understand and be able to put Python and Ruby into practice than HTML or CSS.

How to learn / understand HTML and CSS and be able to use them, different from learning a programming language such as Python or Ruby, and be able to put them into practice.

Answer 1

HTML is just markup. It is more about data and layout in a specific space of browsers and the Internet. There is not much logic. There is nothing like cyclic or conditional constructions. It helps to learn something about HTTP and how clients and browser servers communicate, but what it is.

Python, Ruby, and all other general-purpose languages ​​include those additional complexities that are related to logic. They cover more problem spaces than HTML, so they need to be more flexible and powerful.

Answer 2

HTML and CSS are the "languages" of the presentation - they describe the contents of the document and how it should be presented.

Programming languages ​​such as Python, C #, C, C ++, Delphi, BASIC, Clojure, etc. differ in that they contain logic. You cannot do things like branching and iteration in HTML.

Answer 3

HTML is a markup language used to create documents.
CSS is used to style these documents.

Without Javascript, none of them remotely resemble a regular procedural programming language such as Python or Ruby.

To find out a (regular) real programming language, you need to understand basic programming constructs such as variables, ifs and loop; HTML and CSS have nothing of the kind.

Answer 4

I may seem strange, but for me it was the other way around, and HTML was harder to learn than new programming languages. I studied programming a long time ago when there was no HTML around, and I understood a basic understanding of several constructions (conditions, loop, variables, etc.). I found this again when learning new languages, so learning new languages ​​has become simpler and easier.

When I recognized HTML, I did not see any logic in it. Once you learn the minimal syntax, everything means a bunch of arbitrary tags and obscure parameters (and the behavior of which changes from one browser to another).

I understand that this is not the case for most people, perhaps because HTML is more like a static description of something.

Well, that’s not the whole truth. Learning new languages ​​has become difficult for me every time I change a programming paradigm, for example, from a procedural type C to an object-oriented, like Java, to a functional Haskell type.

What I'm really saying is that I believe that any paradigm shift (basic assumptions in the domain) is complicated. HTML and a programming language are indeed a different paradigm (programming is perhaps more complex than describing a description of changes and HTML describing a state). When you move from one paradigm to another, you need to study the basic meaning again and this is difficult.

Answer 5

For starters, HTML is not a programming language ... not by any definitions I've ever seen. Let it be so ... HTML is not Turing complete.

HTML is a markup language. This allows you to associate symbolic information with user data, which can then be interpreted by a web browser to display user data.