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A comment on Codecademy Adds Beginner Languages HTML and CSS. Parent comment

Re:Codecademy Adds Beginner Languages HTML and CSS by Dn_Ab on Monday April 02, 2012 @03:59PM (#3789782)
I guess it depends on what type of person you are, what type of rules you use to distinguish things. So I am always looking for isomorphisms and equivalence relations. So to me if you are Turing complete then I can define an equivalence between you and a programming language. So Html5+css3 goes in. You can encode turing complete computations into Magic the Gathering? Then yes MTG + Appropriate Encoding can be talked about in the same sentence as programming language.

Whether or not these languages can also be found in the Turing tarpit is a separate thing.

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Re:Codecademy Adds Beginner Languages HTML and CSS by sirclueless on Monday April 02, 2012 @06:52PM (#3790510)
The point isn't that your rules are a bad way of defining computation. The point is that your rules are basically irrelevant as far as deciding what an acceptable language for an online course would be.

Markup languages, even ones that are utterly incapable of encoding even a trivial computation, are way more relevant to computer literacy than Magic: The Gathering. I can guarantee you a beginner will learn more if I teach them how a computer interprets Markdown or HTML than if I teach them how any general computation can be embedded in a card game.

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Re:Codecademy Adds Beginner Languages HTML and CSS by Dn_Ab on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @12:10PM (#3793492)
This reply may never be read... but I was responding to the question "Where do you draw the line?"

So I pointed to where my line was drawn. The given thought was completely independent of what is appropriate for teaching.

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Re:Codecademy Adds Beginner Languages HTML and CSS by evincarofautumn on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @08:38PM (#3795584)
I for one am with you. We were only talking about reasonable ways to divvy up the different categories of language, which is only tangentially related to the article.
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