alt Hacker NewsMany people now know that a tomato is a fruit, and will distinguish it with exactly the 'did you know a tomato is not a vegetable?' fun fact, so I'm not sure this is a great point. If someone asked me to list vegetables and they were being rigorous about it I wouldn't list a tomato. If they're not being rigorous about it then anything goes really - sometimes you can put things like apples in a salad so that must be a vegetable as well.
A tomato is definitely a vegetable.
Botanically, there are no such things as vegetables. The classification of a thing as a "vegetable" is strictly a culinary distinction. Cucumbers, tomatoes, apples, oranges, they're all the fruit of the plant, but the first two are culinarily classified as vegetables and the last two as fruits.
Also, salad is a preparation method, specifically the chopping of ingredients and the application of a sauce to make a semi homogeneous dish. It is not strictly a dish of chopped vegetables, so putting apples "in a salad" doesn't mean the apple is being used as a vegetable. You can put meat in a salad and it doesn't make the meat a vegetable. Tuna salad can be made with no vegetables at all.