Thanks for the link.

I disagree with that though. Especially the sentence "Hello World should be one line". In html, it is. You create a new text file, put the line "Hello World" in it, then you can open it up in your browser and voila. You've got something everyone recognizes: a website.

Of course the more you code, the harder it gets, and eventually you have to add CSS, then JS, and then all hell breaks loose. But you can coast pretty far on basic HTML, with either no CSS, or inline CSS. And I'd argue that that's the direction we should be sending people just getting started in programming.

> I disagree with that though. Especially the sentence "Hello World should be one line". In html, it is. You create a new text file, put the line "Hello World" in it, then you can open it up in your browser and voila.

It depends. It's one line in the sense that 'it works.' It's not one line in the sense that "it works but enables quirks mode and it won't necessarily work right equally in all browsers unless you do all this stuff ..." and that's why I dislike HTML/CSS for learning. Yeah, in the simplest cases, it's kind of easy, but it can get really complex really quickly.

That's not even counting the fact that markup is not really programming, and if you'd like to add some, you've now got TWO languages to learn, HTML + Javascript. And then you might want to do something server side, so now you've got three.

The complexity explodes really quickly.

Yeah, but as a beginner, you don't need to see the complexity.

Mind you, I'm not comparing HTML to other languages for learning, I'm comparing it to QBasic as a "first try at programming" language. The basics had their own problems.

You do end up seeing the complexity. What can you do without Javascript and/or a server side language? Not too much, really.