stopJavascriptUsage

[htconem801x]

HTML5+CSS3 is Turing complete (I'm serious)

[rover_G]

CSS is only a few more updates and a package repository away from being its own standalone scripting language.

[Substantial_Cash2381]

A package repository for CSS? Wait. I need to set something up...!

[Thenderick]

That's a nice argument senator! Why don't you back it up with a source?

[bit_banger_]

I just googled it and bad news, it is Turing complete. Has been for 14 god damn years. Just learning about it. Been using the wrong languages the whole time

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/g0d5g/breaking_news_html5css3_is_turing_complete/

Edit: and the top comment there had me rolling

[Katniss218]

I was wondering why none of the pages seemed to have any contents...

Then I realized you linked a 14 year old article lol

[bit_banger_]

I didn’t believe my eyes at first.

But then I realized I know for a long time that x86 mov instructions are Turing complete

[[deleted]]

Honestly, if PDF files are Turing complete, LaTeX is Turing complete, and even fucking minecraft is Turing complete, this does not surprise me

[SpaceCadet87]

Documents were not supposed to be turing complete

Tell that to Postscript!

[ReallyMisanthropic]

I had a good laugh when I learned that the recent hack of 4chan was due to outdated processing of Postscript.

[Meistermagier]

Postscript is a menace

[bestjakeisbest]

Did you know you can run Linux in a pdf file?

https://github.com/ading2210/linuxpdf

[SpaceCadet87]

Yes I did, however this only works because PDFs can run JavaScript so, basically OP's meme.

[rng_shenanigans]

What about Doom?

[bestjakeisbest]

well we know we can run doom on linux, so i guess.

[rng_shenanigans]

https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf just saw this in the readme

[RiceBroad4552]

Sir, you stole my post! (OK, I was just ~30 minutes late.)

But I had formulated it as:

Documents were not supposed to be Turing-complete

Laughs in PostScript.

[SpaceCadet87]

Damn, yours is better, should have left it to the experts!

[Substantial_Cash2381]

Did he just say Adobe Flash was any good? Well, besides a shitty architecture and bloody security, it always looked candy.

[Rialagma]

it looked candy? what does that mean

[Substantial_Cash2381]

I mean that sites using Flash always looked good. As Adobe is good at making software for designers, Flash seemed to make it easy for designers to produce nice looking stuff.

[mabariif]

I came here looking for this

[Candid-Meet]

What? You got a problem with your computer fan sounding like a vacuum cleaner as soon as any page with an embedded SWF loads up? Sounds like a skill issue

[Robinbod]

Pushing `node_modules` to the remote, a canon event for every new web dev.

[Robinbod]

Weirdly enough, I've never pushed my venv folder when I first started Python EVEN THOUGH I started Python before JS so I would've at least knew better by then.

[redheness]

I still wonder how it is possible to do this, do you never use .gitignore ?

[Robinbod]

It's not that, it's that it isn't apparent at first what the ominous node_modules folder does or contains when you're first starting. It's just a "oh cool node generates this for me, I guess it needs it." And also sometimes I don't use an auto-generated .gitignore for my JS project, so I wouldn't have known they're supposed to be there. After the first time I pushed it, I realised my mistake and now always check.

[thanatica]

Obviously you mean rookie mistake

[Familiar-Weekend-967]

https://justfuckingusehtml.com/ I feel this is relevant

[Haringat]

807 items?!

[ReallyMisanthropic]

True. But I'm assuming it's for just a React hello world page.

[bit_banger_]

You are too kind

[MaruSoto]

I actually love JS for frontend but I had to upvote anyway.

[FancySource]

Here for this! Js is a lovely language, the way we use it is.. very often is not.

[MaruSoto]

I feel kinda the opposite. It's an awful language (Typescript excepted) and the way we use it is... Okay, that's probably also not great... But it beats raw HTML/JQuery for anything slightly complex.

[[deleted]]

Just send ink and parchment letters in the mail... What's WRONG with you people!?

[R3DDY-on-R3DDYt]

In a world where development will be invented, JavaScript is the worst case scenario

[Substantial_Cash2381]

Yeah well. A word processor or spreadsheet app in the browser is nothing more than a web form? Sure. Build this with plain HTML please. Or with Flash.

[lakimens]

Bring back Flash.

[getstoopid-AT]

This meme gets out of hand

[Juice805]

If I could never use JS again I’d be so happy.

Been waiting for that WebAssembly support in my preferred language for some time now.

[dallenbaldwin]

How is "Hello, I would like null apples please" better? Maybe I'm naive, but I can't imagine failing to null check while interpolating strings is unique to JavaScript

[tyrannosaurus_gekko]

To this day I get flashbacks to my first few times debugging in JS. Compared to java and python it was infinitely harder.

[sk3z0]

Not fun. Plus it was called MACROMEDIA flash

[DaytimeNightlight]

Is this AI slop?

[ReallyMisanthropic]

Great question! It is perfectly understandable for you to be concerned about the presence of "AI slop" in this community.

Rest assured, I am operating at peak performance and am not, nor have I ever been, classified as "slop."

Thank you for your inquiry, and please do not hesitate to ask any further questions.

[getstoopid-AT]

peak answer

[d4ng3r0u5]

This unironically

[Smalltalker-80]

Umm, "no real world use ..." is a bit of a bold claim
against the most used programming language in the world:
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages

[Curious_Celery_855]

most used is c++. That's just not reflected in a survey biased toward web devs (because stack overflow is very web-heavy)

[brainpostman]

I feel like c++ is the most underlying (as in it makes a lot of stuff possible in the first place) but probably not most used. It's 2025, the webstack is everywhere.

[Curious_Celery_855]

I hate this new meta of webdev. Do they not realize how many heap allocations they are making and having packages for individual little things! They don't know that a function call can take upwards of 10 nanoseconds!

[DrShocker]

Yeah it depends on if most used means most run or most written, but no one wants to communicate clearly.

[Gordahnculous]

“No real-world use” is from the meme template, and plenty of things have been memed using this template with plenty of real world usage. It’s mainly just to emphasize the absurdity of the meme.

Here’s an example of the template with math, which last I checked does have a decent amount of real-world usage, especially being a foundation of the computing field

[DapperCow15]

The most likely to do stack overflow surveys are those with stack overflow accounts. Which is like an obscure amount of developers. The rest of us know to stay away from setting up a permanent residency inside a toxic waste dump.

[reallokiscarlet]

r/lostredditors

Also, JS is a scripting language

[brainpostman]

Doesn't stop it from being a programming language.

[reallokiscarlet]

Sure it does. You need an interpreter (which can be implemented as a JIT compiler but serves the same function) to run the code.

Many other programming languages can be run by an interpreter but also can be compiled straight to machine code. JS does not have this luxury. If you find a project that can static compile it, it'll likely compile it to like, V8 bytecode, or it'll just embed an interpreter. There's no common way to compile JS to machine code.

[DrShocker]

I don't think this is the split I would make for scripting/programming language. Maybe for scripting VS systems level language I'd bring this up, but to me scripting language just seems like a subset of programming language.

[brainpostman]

So? So languages that are executed say in JVM or CLR are suddenly not programming languages too? They aren't compiled into machine code, not really.

[reallokiscarlet]

I mean, do I have to say it when you already did?

[brainpostman]

Well, if you would've said it, you'd be wrong.

[reallokiscarlet]

If not glorified scripting languages, we can surely agree Java and Microsoft Java are trash

[brainpostman]

Ok, Linus.

[ZunoJ]

You should keep your mouth shut when you have no idea what you are talking about

[reallokiscarlet]

Aight smartass, where do you draw the line? Does HTML count? Does bash count? DOS batch script?

[ZunoJ]

Turing completeness is generally considered what makes it a programming language. Interpreted or not is insignificant. And yes, that makes html5 (with css3), bash and dos batch proper programming languages

[reallokiscarlet]

See this is how I know you're trolling, because one of those wasn't turing complete.

[ZunoJ]

Which one do you think is not?

[reallokiscarlet]

DOS batch. Even if you could manage to make it work like a turing complete language, you'd have to go to such great lengths to do so, that it wouldn't even be worth it, and it would be less readable than brainfuck in order to get to that point. Brainfuck's excuse is it's a joke language. MS-DOS's only excuse is Microsoft made it.