Spreadsheets have function calls as well, and yet non-programmers can use them. We don't care about making a theoretically pure distinction, we care about making something that non-programmers can actually use.

I didn't intend to denigrate your work - I think it's really interesting.

However, to advertise it as not being programming seems bogus to me. In Excel, you click the "fx" button and choose "SUM" and then select some cells with your mouse and it pops in there =SUM(A1:A4) for you, which feels in practice quite far from what I would consider programming, and I think people who are non-programmers but have the right sort of mindset can usually fathom this stuff.

The example I quoted above, however, looks a lot more like programming to me, and the nested parentheses alone would be enough to scare off a lot of non-technical types. I have dealt with many people over the years who have to do a bit of programming in their roles but really aren't programmers in the conventional sense, and they find things like the difference between A(B(1,2,3)) and A(B(1,2),3) extremely hard to grasp.

...by abusing existing terminology in confusing ways, clouding the issue. Exactly like http://catb.org/jargon/html/E/English.html , named just so marketing team could claim "You can program our computers in English!"

I assumed the claim was based on differentiating a markup language from programming languages. HTML (and CSS) is code, but not programming code.

I see what you're saying, but that looks like a function call embedded in the HTML.

Embedding your programming into HTML doesn't make it any less programming. Otherwise, you could say web programming doesn't exist since it's all just HTML script tags.

Hmm, yes, the readable() value does look like a function call with the sort of unforgiving, indecipherable syntax that can give a non-programmer trouble when they have to do more than paste a sample (e.g. actually enter a filename, including the path). That blurs the "programming" line more.