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MDN converted to Markdown

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Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#51

Post by juliendorra »

swyx wrote: post #8
nerdponx wrote: post #6

It's too bad that AsciiDoc still hasn't really caught on like Markdown. It's a whole lot nicer for more-complicated documents. I understand their reasons for not using it here, but it still seems like a perfect fit for this task. Eclipse still seems to be working on a formal spec, but hopefully that will help implementations to grow and adoption to increase. In any case, avoiding raw HTML is a huge improvement. I lik…

Markdown is "worse is better". AsciiDoc is more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve, therefore it lost. tale as old as tech. EDIT: i'm compiling a list of "Worse is Better" technology battles: - Mixed paradigm languages vs Functional languages - Typescript vs Flow - React+Redux beat Angular and Elm - VHS beat Betamax - AC beat DC - what else? please share more here https://hashnode.com/preview/636602dec7fec996…

Love the idea of the list, the intro sets the context very nicely! Some suggestions: - HTML is a worse hypertext system (no typed links, no transclusion, no native index or versioning) and beat all the previous professional but centralized hypertext systems in just 3 years. It’s worse than HyperCard on the symmetrical authoring and viewing side, too. - json, from an historical perspective is really a worse xml (xml can serialize a much wider range of data structures and relationships, including circular ones, can be validated by schemas, etc.). But simpler to read, write and reason about. It limits ended up biting devs and it was extended in various, non standards ways

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#52

Post by nullfield »

xigoi wrote: post #49
nerdponx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has a steeper learning curve Does it? I think Markdown "won" for a variety of reasons (Github? Slack? Pandoc?). I don't think AsciiDoc is so much more complicated than Markdown that people can't learn it quickly. The reason Markdown is now standard is that people like standardized things. They want to use the same syntax in their chatroom, forum, ad-hoc readme filed, and doc comments in code. And if they're already…

> The reason Markdown is now standard is that people like standardized things. Can you think of anything less standardized than Markdown?

Without answering the question, it was the wrong answer, unambiguously and definitively.

No, I don’t have to have the correct, best answer to get this.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#53

Post by gryn »

swyx wrote: post #8
nerdponx wrote: post #6

It's too bad that AsciiDoc still hasn't really caught on like Markdown. It's a whole lot nicer for more-complicated documents. I understand their reasons for not using it here, but it still seems like a perfect fit for this task. Eclipse still seems to be working on a formal spec, but hopefully that will help implementations to grow and adoption to increase. In any case, avoiding raw HTML is a huge improvement. I lik…

Markdown is "worse is better". AsciiDoc is more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve, therefore it lost. tale as old as tech. EDIT: i'm compiling a list of "Worse is Better" technology battles: - Mixed paradigm languages vs Functional languages - Typescript vs Flow - React+Redux beat Angular and Elm - VHS beat Betamax - AC beat DC - what else? please share more here https://hashnode.com/preview/636602dec7fec996…

angular ? really ??? in what way is it better ?

I've used vue, angular, and react in different projects and honestly I'd take react with hooks every single time If I had the choice.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#54

Post by Aissen »

beebeepka wrote: post #13

Recently I overheard that our company intends to use markdown for configuration purposes - replacing yaml and stuff. I am not against the idea but it did surprise me because while I am happy with writing documents in MD, it never occurred to me that it could be used for configs. Not sure what the upsides and downsides are.

Whether using yaml or something more modern like Cue, nowadays a configuration language needs a semantic syntax checker (not just a parser), and tools to automate transformation. If you think you are OK building these with Markdown, go for it. But you'll find it's probably a bad idea in the end…

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#55

Post by mananaysiempre »

iamtedd wrote: post #35
swyx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markdown is "worse is better". AsciiDoc is more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve, therefore it lost. tale as old as tech. EDIT: i'm compiling a list of "Worse is Better" technology battles: - Mixed paradigm languages vs Functional languages - Typescript vs Flow - React+Redux beat Angular and Elm - VHS beat Betamax - AC beat DC - what else? please share more here https://hashnode.com/preview/636602dec7fec996…

In what way is DC better than AC? To my knowledge AC rightfully won - much easier to transport over long distances, whereas DC required a generator nearly on every city block (among other reasons).

AC is easy to change the voltage of with 20th-century tech (even high-power 21st-century tech for DC amounts to “convert to AC, shift that, filter it back” with some—crucial—improvements), so it works reasonably well over moderate distances at moderate power if you shift down as late as possible, but it’s absolutely awful for transporting large quantities of energy over long distances, because of the skin effect.

Essentially, thick round wires are useless for AC because the current gets expelled to a thin layer on the surface (determined by the frequency and the properties of the material, roughly independent of how much you were trying to cram in there), thus the resistance goes down as the radius rather than the cross-sectional area, and you end up using absolutely asinine amounts of (nowadays very expensive) copper or (kind of expensive) aluminium in high-voltage lines. (Using flat buses instead of wires does work, but then sharp edges mean you get a lot more current leaking into the air.)

If you don’t have high-power semiconductor components you can use to convert to AC and back in order to shift voltages or to just convert to AC in order to power industrial motors, you will have to grit your teeth and bear it—it seems that mechanical motor-generators are simply too unreliable. But for the last twenty or so years we’ve had them, and I understand that people are once again looking seriously at high-voltage DC. Of course, grids are huge and expensive, so it may be some time until implementations become common.

I don’t think any of this counts as an instance of worse is better, though,—it’s just that the ease of building alternators changed dramatically over the last few decades.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#56

Post by chaosite »

iamtedd wrote: post #35
swyx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markdown is "worse is better". AsciiDoc is more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve, therefore it lost. tale as old as tech. EDIT: i'm compiling a list of "Worse is Better" technology battles: - Mixed paradigm languages vs Functional languages - Typescript vs Flow - React+Redux beat Angular and Elm - VHS beat Betamax - AC beat DC - what else? please share more here https://hashnode.com/preview/636602dec7fec996…

In what way is DC better than AC? To my knowledge AC rightfully won - much easier to transport over long distances, whereas DC required a generator nearly on every city block (among other reasons).

And of course, AC didn't beat DC. DC is still widely used, for example in whatever device you're using to post this comment.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#57

Post by tgv »

iopq wrote: post #39
tgv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English isn't a bad language; its spelling is highly inconsistent, but for the rest it's simpler than most other languages. The only advantage Esperanto has is that it doesn't give (much of) an advantage to pre-existing native speakers. For the rest, it's perhaps even harder to learn than English, and --when hypothetically adopted on a large scale-- will develop into regional dialects.

Spanish spelling is better, pronunciation is easier (no th, only 5 vowels, etc.), native speakers almost as numerable, allows you to understand Portuguese, Italian, etc. It wasn't chosen, America just won

Spanish orthography is pretty regular, but then you have 42 inflections per verb for three different patterns, and the most important verbs are of course highly irregular. Not to mention the fact that the difference between ser and estar isn't easy to learn. And there are a few more things that are hard (limiting to pronunciation: the guttural j/g, and the rr; counting syllables is a recurring question in quizzes).

> It wasn't chosen, America just won

That doesn't make English a bad language. Perhaps America (I guess you're referring to the USA) won because of English is so easy.

But cultural, financial and political influence obviously count.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#58

Post by keybored »

xigoi wrote: post #46
keybored wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to use quotes (or any other symbol) sometimes based on learned rules is a big no-no for lightweight markup in my book.

In Markdown, you sometimes have to put a backslash before special characters.

I was talking about quoting or grouping things. Either require things like quotes for certain constructs all the time (no matter the content) or don’t.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#59

Post by NoboruWataya »

swyx wrote: post #8
nerdponx wrote: post #6

It's too bad that AsciiDoc still hasn't really caught on like Markdown. It's a whole lot nicer for more-complicated documents. I understand their reasons for not using it here, but it still seems like a perfect fit for this task. Eclipse still seems to be working on a formal spec, but hopefully that will help implementations to grow and adoption to increase. In any case, avoiding raw HTML is a huge improvement. I lik…

Markdown is "worse is better". AsciiDoc is more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve, therefore it lost. tale as old as tech. EDIT: i'm compiling a list of "Worse is Better" technology battles: - Mixed paradigm languages vs Functional languages - Typescript vs Flow - React+Redux beat Angular and Elm - VHS beat Betamax - AC beat DC - what else? please share more here https://hashnode.com/preview/636602dec7fec996…

> AsciiDoc is more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve

How does this make it better? Sounds like it makes it worse.

Maybe a better summation is "less is more".

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#60

Post by xwx »

Lvl999Noob wrote: post #42
swyx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markdown is "worse is better". AsciiDoc is more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve, therefore it lost. tale as old as tech. EDIT: i'm compiling a list of "Worse is Better" technology battles: - Mixed paradigm languages vs Functional languages - Typescript vs Flow - React+Redux beat Angular and Elm - VHS beat Betamax - AC beat DC - what else? please share more here https://hashnode.com/preview/636602dec7fec996…

Isn't typescript better than flow? In what ways is flow better?

The main advantage Flow has over Typescript is soundness. Neither language is sound, but Flow tries a bit harder, and so there are fewer cases where you write bugs that 'should' be caught by the type checker.

Here are a few examples of unsoundness in TS: https://www.typescriptlang.org/play?strictFunctionTypes=fals...

https://flow.org/en/docs/lang/types-and-expressions/#toc-sou...

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