Do submissions have to be answered with a programming language?

Question

We've got various answers strewn across meta that tell different stories:

On the standard loopholes, we disallow answers that aren't programming languages. This appears to be the most definitive answer of the lot. It has a vote count of 16/-8.

However, on a question that asks "Should answers to fixed-output challenges be written in a programming language?", the top answer says that we shouldn't "generally disallow solutions written in non-programming languages". It's vote count is currently 19/-5.

On yet another post, we are asking what programming languages are, and xnor says that "For this purpose, I think that markup languages and limited output languages should be treated the same as programming languages". Vote count of 18/-3.

On that same question, the leading answer provides a very solid definition of a programming language, which excludes languages which can't represent natural numbers or tuples, add two natual numbers, determine primality of a natural number, and operate on either a decision model (accept or reject an input based on rules in the program, a la Prolog) or a transformation model (transform an input into an output using the algorithm defined in the program, a la C) (vote count +57/-4). A remark from this answer:

This definition excludes HQ9+. I don't consider this a problem either, for two reasons:

1. It was created as a joke rather than a language, and has ceased to be funny in the context of this site.

2. I think that every interesting problem which HQ9+ can "solve" has already been asked, so I don't think this will exclude any interesting answers in the future.

Without discussing what a programming language is, do we allow non-programming languages on any challenge (assuming it can answer the challenge)?

Regardless of whether the answer is Yes/No, can we also please edit/remove answers that conflict with the official view we hold?

Answer 1

Answering in non-programming languages is allowed

The best challenges are written in terms of input and output. We avoid Do X without Y challenges because the Y is usually not defined in terms of input/output.

Disallowing non-programming languages is like disallowing arbitrary classes of languages. As long as they produce the right output with given input, they are fine.

If we disallow non-programming languages, then people will simply create clones of the non-programming languages that now fit our arbitrary "programming language" requirements.

Now, to address some common concerns:

1. If you are non-programming language, you aren't programming. Tell this to everybody who writes HTML or CSS¹. Programming is all about problem solving. The act of implementing a solution to a problem is programming. This is why we allow non-programming golf challenges.
2. If a non-programming language can solve a challenge, then that's a sign that the challenge is poor: I frankly don't see how this matters. If the challenge is poor, then downvote it/close it. If the challenge is of good quality, then let people answer it however they want.
3. Non-programming languages answers are usually uninteresting. Yeah, if your answer is simply the text from a kolmogorov-challenge, that's uninteresting. However, this problem isn't limited to non-programming languages. print "Hello world" and "Hello world" are equally uninteresting (and H in HQ9+ is more interesting than either of those).
4. We've run out of challenges for non-programming languages to be competitive in. If that is true, then we simply won't see them on any more challenges, problem solved. If they are answering a challenge without being competitive, we already have policies for that. If they are competitive, then let's allow them!

We have a serious double-standards problem here:

1. We are disallowing arbitrary classes of languages.
2. We are disallowing them on non-kolmogorov-complexity challenges, where they have the most chance of being interesting
3. We are disallowing languages based off of whether they can solve arbitrary problems (like "primality checking"), not whether they can solve the problem at hand.

This madness needs to stop.

¹I know, CSS technically is a programming language, but 99% percent of the programmers aren't using it as a programming language.

Answer 2

No, answers in non-programming languages are not allowed

This site is Programming Puzzles and Code Golf. From Wikipedia:

Programming involves activities such as analysis, developing understanding, generating algorithms, verification of requirements of algorithms including their correctness and resources consumption, and implementation (commonly referred to as coding[1][2]) of algorithms in a target programming language.

^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming}

We have a policy on what defines a programming language. Writing a "program" in a "language" that does not meet those requirements is not programming, and thus does not fit in the scope for Programming Puzzles and Code Golf.

A challenge being solvable in a non-programming language is often a sign that the challenge has quality issues. We've already exhausted (or, at least, have mostly exhausted) the list of unique problems that are solvable in non-programming languages (outputting fixed text, for example) and where such a solution would be competitive. There is nothing more for such languages to contribute to the site.