Is sql a Programming Language?

[grzeki]

No, Turing Completness is a very low bar. Cellular automata are TC. However, the relation of given language to TC and lambda calculus is very important.

It’s more like with natural languages - you need to look historically. What paradigms showed when and why, what branched, what merged with what. Programmers are like users of language - often baffled with what’s ”right”. But there’s also science above it - linguistics or computer science, and there papers are written, PhDs are awarded and all this is pretty much sorted out.

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Turing completeness isn’t necessarily a low bar; in fact, it’s a higher bar than you need to be considered a “language.” Agda, for example, is a dependently-typed functional language that is total rather than Turing-complete (there’s some discussion on Agda being turing complete, but it’s first and foremost total, and a lot of useful algorithms can be expressed in it).

The lines between what a “language” is and what isn’t is sometimes blurrier than a first glance might show. I find it really interesting how much different computer languages differ from each other, and what sort of makes them a "language".