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MDN converted to Markdown

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Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#121

Post by mananaysiempre »

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…

s/alternators/inverters/, d’oh.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#122

Post by swyx »

juliendorra wrote: post #51
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…

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 c…

thanks for the contributions!

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#123

Post by swyx »

developerDan wrote: post #99
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…

HDMI beat DP, it’s one that will always bug me.

good suggestion ! why does it bug you?

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#124

Post by swyx »

remram wrote: post #89
NoboruWataya wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

GP seems to be using a definition of "better" that doesn't include difficulty. I agree that it's a bad decision when evaluating a markup language used in so many contexts as Markdown.

literally just referencing richard gabriel’s use of the word thats all. each side has genuine champions but usually one side is more purist (however defined) than the other and they lose 80% of the time

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#125

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

kubanczyk wrote: post #20
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…

Out of curiosity I've looked up "asciidoc tutorial". 10% into the first page and I see this: A [.myrole]#custom role# must be fulfilled by the theme. Wait, is this in example 7 of 97? That's already... disturbing? But I scroll just a little down and I see examples 11 and 12: https://chat.asciidoc.org[Discuss AsciiDoc,role=external,window=_blank] CAUTION If the link text contains a comma and the text is followed by on…

Like any good compression algorithm, asciidoctor optimizes for the common cases at the expense of the uncommon cases. For 98% of text you write, asciidoctor is probably much simpler than HTML

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#126

Post by salmo »

bee_rider wrote: post #115
salmo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's also the budding euro-English, which is kinda funny because it is to some extent the revenge of all the words we've stolen from other European languages and then slowly turned into false-friends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English#Vocabulary Anyway as an American I'm always in favor of just giving our language away to anyone to do whatever they want with it, really just go nuts, especially -- throw so…

Totally agree. I love that it’s the gumbo of languages. Throw whatever you want in there. I’m down.

And as an American I reject the British pronunciation of “herb” and “lieutenant.”

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#127

Post by iopq »

klodolph wrote: post #114
iopq wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been running, I had been running, I will have had run, I would have had been running English has a large amount of tenses as well, and if I were you I wouldn't discount the English subjunctive either

"I will have had run" and "I would have had been running" are not sensible. Perfect tenses indicate completion. If you try to "stack" two copies the auxiliary verb "have" to make some kind of double-perfect tense, it doesn't make any sense--it makes no more sense than saying "I wented to the store" or "I ated the food." There are reasons you can have utterances like "had had" in English, but it typically involves the…

"By next month I will have had run 50 km" - is there a BETTER way to say this sentence? It refers to the past from the prism of next month, but also RELATES it to that point in time

"If I had continued boxing professionally, I would have been running 50 km a week" Here's it's a conditional, I think I stuck an extra had in there by accident.

By my English textbook there's 16 tenses, 4x4

Past, present, future, future-in-the-past (would) x Simple, continuous, perfect, continuous-perfect (have been V-ing)

Point being, English grammar is far from simple, as this conversation clearly demonstrated

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#128

Post by iopq »

samus wrote: post #119
iopq wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (at least some European variants) definitely has the "th-sounds" though. But similarly to English, it's not terribly important to get them right. The variants spoken in South America use sibilants instead.

Oh yeah, I studied Latin American Spanish so I did forget that Spaniards do have these sounds. But the vowel number is clearly smaller. The hardest sound is probably the "rr" rolling r

In English it's probably distinguishing between a number of vowels like BAD/BED or PULL/POOL, and words like STRENGTH that really test the limits of Mandarin speakers

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#129

Post by klodolph »

iopq wrote: post #127
klodolph wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I will have had run" and "I would have had been running" are not sensible. Perfect tenses indicate completion. If you try to "stack" two copies the auxiliary verb "have" to make some kind of double-perfect tense, it doesn't make any sense--it makes no more sense than saying "I wented to the store" or "I ated the food." There are reasons you can have utterances like "had had" in English, but it typically involves the…

"By next month I will have had run 50 km" - is there a BETTER way to say this sentence? It refers to the past from the prism of next month, but also RELATES it to that point in time "If I had continued boxing professionally, I would have been running 50 km a week" Here's it's a conditional, I think I stuck an extra had in there by accident. By my English textbook there's 16 tenses, 4x4 Past, present, future, future-i…

> "By next month I will have had run 50 km" - is there a BETTER way to say this sentence?

By next month, I will have run 50km. This means that "I run 50km" completes first, and then next month arrives afterwards.

> By my English textbook there's 16 tenses, 4x4

Depends on how you count tenses. Different textbooks will give different counts, depending on what is considered a "tense". Which is not a reflection of the complexity of English, but a reflection of how hard it is to come up with definitions for terms in linguistics. "Would" is often not counted as a tense, but it may be counted as a tense, particularly if you are explaining English to speakers of a language which have a tense expressing something similar.

> Point being, English grammar is far from simple, as this conversation clearly demonstrated

Most languages are far from simple, I don't think English deserves special attention.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#130

Post by rhaway84773 »

pantojax45 wrote: post #74
whoibrar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The bold/italics/indent syntax predates markdown. Markdown is great but the “*” / “_” / “>” were all in use before it (see Usenet emails for example)

Well, that’s why Markdown was popular. It took existing conventions, codified them, and more importantly, crested a tool to convert them to HTML.

At its core, Markdown was little more than a perl script that converted a human readable doc written using many online conventions into HTML.

Others realized this was a brilliant idea and created their own supersets and/or alternatives of markdown. That’s why there’s so many flavors of markdown with little tweaks.

And that’s why Markdown is popular. Because it took advantage of convention built out of years of trial and error.

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