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MDN converted to Markdown

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Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#61

Post by rrwo »

tgv wrote: post #38
gherkinnn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Javascript vs * - English vs * Both awful languages in many ways. And yet, here we are. Also who the fuck wants to speak Esperanto? In some cases I don’t think it’s “worse is better”, much as “the flexible beats the over-designed ivory tower”. Another way of looking at it is “capabilities matter, vulnerabilities don’t”. Think of a river carving its way through a valley. It is terribly undesigned and messy but it fl…

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.

English has inconsistent spelling and pronunciation because it is a pigeon language, a mix of various Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, Dutch, and Norman French, then later with a lot of Latin and Greek words added.

The grammar is simpler (no gender and fewer inflections), but it has more phonemes than most other Indo-European languages, and has one of the largest vocabularies.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#62

Post by rrwo »

nerdponx wrote: post #12
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…

> 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…

Markdown is appealing because you can read a markdown document without knowing markdown. It's intended to make sense on it's own.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#63

Post by talkingtab »

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…

"Worse is better" is always true if you choose the criteria carefully. For example it is always worse to eat food because it might be poisonous. Markdown certainly has limitations, but it more people know it and people can and do use it.

More "powerful" is a good criteria, unless you have to pay the price.

I applaud the decision and the work by the authors. It worked.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#64

Post by nimish »

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 has to deal with reactance and those associated losses in addition to resistance. AC resistance goes up with frequency because of the skin effect too.

This matters for underwater lines especially.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#65

Post by whoibrar »

rrwo wrote: post #62
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…

Markdown is appealing because you can read a markdown document without knowing markdown. It's intended to make sense on it's own.

I agree with this. Reddit and Discord both use markdown and I've been using it for ages without ever knowing it's called Markdown.

I just thought it's a neat trick you can apply italics by underscore and make text stand out with back ticks around.

Even least technical people using bold/italics/indent on WhatsApp are using markdown in a way.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#66

Post by salmo »

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

I think an appealing thing about English is the ridiculous vocabulary. When it doesn’t have a word, it just steals one from another language. We have a French-based word that’s a “fancy” way to say an English-based synonym from the court vs common language situation with the Normans. Then borrowed liberally from Greek and Latin during the enlightenment, and every other language when colonialism kicked in (including a lot of botched Spanish). That constant borrowing is partly why our spelling is insane.

Oh and add to the insanity that we’ll borrow the same French word twice, frozen in each time.

It’s fascinating to see the language evolve through eg India. It’s a secondary language that fills a gap to provide a commonly understood language in a region with massive linguistic diversity. But then it’s developed it’s own regionalisms that are bleeding back into regions where it is the primary language.

It’s kind of like shell scripting to me. It started simple, got random useful things tacked on over time. You can’t formally define it, but it’s pragmatically powerful. And there aren’t real rules despite people trying so hard over the years, just conventions that shift and change. And often the “rule makers” just make things more complicated in the end with only some of it sticking.

I highly recommend the English History Podcast for anyone interested.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#67

Post by jcranmer »

rrwo wrote: post #61
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.

English has inconsistent spelling and pronunciation because it is a pigeon language, a mix of various Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, Dutch, and Norman French, then later with a lot of Latin and Greek words added. The grammar is simpler (no gender and fewer inflections), but it has more phonemes than most other Indo-European languages, and has one of the largest vocabularies.

The word you're looking for is "pidgin" language, not "pigeon," but no, English is not a pidgin language. An example of a pidgin language is something like Tok Pisin. Pidgin languages essentially start out life as a not-quite-language, with such restricted vocabulary and grammar that there are concepts that can't be uttered, and such languages tend to grow back a grammar on top of that as they develop into a full, proper language.

English is not a pidgin language because the grammar is very clearly identifiable as a Germanic language (albeit a clearly simplified form), but with substantial lexical borrowings from other languages. Grammatical simplification and lexical borrowing is not particularly unusual in language development--in fact, English may not even be the biggest offender in these departments (I believe Turkic languages borrowed more from Mongolian languages than English has from Romance languages).

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#69

Post by javajosh »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #55
iamtedd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ess…

>you end up using absolutely asinine amounts of (nowadays very expensive) copper or (kind of expensive) aluminium in high-voltage lines

I assume there's some reason big hollow wires don't work.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#70

Post by sequoia »

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?

Flow is not better than typescript. People who say it’s “better”, what they mean is it’s more strict, which really means more rigid. The rigidity is a complete pain in the ass that’s not well suited to web UI development and leads to all kinds of convolution.

To take one example: I use a Graphql to flow type generator for query fragment. That tool generates inexact types. So I’ll end up with an array of values of this type from a Graphql query, data objects with 10 keys for example.

Then I want to pass this to a charting library, but I need to add a “color” property to each data object for the charting library. This is not possible with flow. My options are:

- create a new type with color property and spread the existing type: this is not possible because the existing type is inexact and I have no way to convince flow it doesn’t already have a color property

- just add a color property: this won’t work because I get a flow error later when I try to read the property, plus I don’t get the type check I’d like

- create a new type plucking every other field from the existing type 1x1, then create a mapping function moving every property to the new type 1x1

- use $FlowFixMe to disable type checking altogether

The only options that work are the last two, and they either break typing altogether or require dozens of additional lines of code that serve no purpose but satisfying Flow. And or course you need a comment to explain why the hell you’re mapping properties over one by one.

I don’t need a type system that’s this “correct.” I’m not writing mathematical proofs, I’m writing web UIs, and this level of rigidity just gets in the way and leads to weird, overly verbose code.

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