Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Markdown took over the world

anildash.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 353 posts

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#61

Post by ajross »

kazinator wrote: post #38
w10-1 wrote: post #6

This is good and detailed, but misses a broader trend: how "worse is better" started to win - first Java over C++, then python and javascript over Java, and here markdown over Word and docbook. When markdown emerged, docbook was getting even more elaborate, and vendors everywhere had for decades been locking people into frameworks and languages with fantastic features that were hard to use -- and then the internet bu…

Java isn't worse than C++; it has a much more capable run-time, something which is left as an implementation-defined footnote in C++. Java had a leg-up over C++ by several decades in having a concurrency story (at all) in the language. I wouldn't use std:: anything for threads even in a greenfield C++ project today. Garbage collection is more advanced than the primitive management tools available in C++, like smart p…

> Java had a leg-up over C++ by several decades in having a concurrency story (at all) in the language.

While sort of technically true, concurrent code expressed in high level language was almost invented in C in the 1980's as the first Unix SMP devices took off (early multiprocessing work at the OS level was at the assembly level, Unix was almost alone in having a portable kernel and the need for SMP).

Java, coming along about a decade later from the same incubation environment, very much reflects that learning. But no, they did it right in Java because they had already done it in C.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#62

Post by Johnny_Bonk »

I'm fairly new to all this, but my understanding is that Markdown is great for a few reasons:

It's just plain text, so no vendor lock-in and you can ripgrep/fzf/grep through it Lives happily in git repos with proper diffs LLMs speak it natively - they output Markdown, they understand Markdown input Way easier for agents to parse than PDFs (which are binary, layout-focused, tables turn to mush) Can do tables (at least in GFM), headers, code blocks, links - all structure preserved

What it can't do (as far as I understand): complex layouts, precise typography, embedded binary content, anything that needs pixel-perfect rendering. Am I missing anything? What are the other limitations I should know about?

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#63

Post by riffic »

There's something really interesting about the constraints given by plain text that you would lose with What You See Is What You Get (or, the ever-unfortunate acronym WYSIWYG) controls. I almost think what you get in that case is an unfortunate mindset-shift towards What You See Is All There Is (or, an incredibly dope acronym, WYSIATI).

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#64

Post by embedding-shape »

rkp8000 wrote: post #57

I love Markdown. I'm a bit surprised, though, that you still can't open a .md file by default in most web browsers. It seems like it should be quite trivial to have the browser automatically convert it to html and display it.

Yeah, also missing a built-in JS API for turning Markdown into safe HTML. Sure, there are lots of different implementations, but maybe start with something small at least.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#65

Post by Analemma_ »

This is a good article, although I wish it had talked a little more about the standardization (or rather, the lack thereof) in Markdown. I get why it didn't, it's trying to be positive about something that is an overwhelming net positive for the world, but I think a "warts-and-all" treatment of the history would be more honest.

I appreciate that Gruber brought this very helpful thing into the world, but OTOH he was such a prick about the whole Standard Markdown debate, for no real reason other than ego. And it resulted in Markdown remaining an ill-defined standard to this day, with occasional compatibility issues still cropping up even though most platforms support most of "Github-flavored Markdown" (itself a stupid name and indicative how badly this has gone).

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#66

Post by extra_rice »

kleiba wrote: post #25
w10-1 wrote: post #6

This is good and detailed, but misses a broader trend: how "worse is better" started to win - first Java over C++, then python and javascript over Java, and here markdown over Word and docbook. When markdown emerged, docbook was getting even more elaborate, and vendors everywhere had for decades been locking people into frameworks and languages with fantastic features that were hard to use -- and then the internet bu…

Let's not forget org-mode.

For some time, I used org-mode for almost all type of note taking. I love the structure being functional without HTML rendering. However, it's pretty much locked to emacs and so the portability is very poor. I need most of my notes to be at least readable on my mobile devices.

When I discovered Obsidian, I decided to fully switch to Markdown. It's very nice that it supports vi bindings.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#67

Post by da_chicken »

kazinator wrote: post #38
w10-1 wrote: post #6

This is good and detailed, but misses a broader trend: how "worse is better" started to win - first Java over C++, then python and javascript over Java, and here markdown over Word and docbook. When markdown emerged, docbook was getting even more elaborate, and vendors everywhere had for decades been locking people into frameworks and languages with fantastic features that were hard to use -- and then the internet bu…

Java isn't worse than C++; it has a much more capable run-time, something which is left as an implementation-defined footnote in C++. Java had a leg-up over C++ by several decades in having a concurrency story (at all) in the language. I wouldn't use std:: anything for threads even in a greenfield C++ project today. Garbage collection is more advanced than the primitive management tools available in C++, like smart p…

It's hard to look at Java and not see it as a transitional language now. Electron, Node, and even .Net have fundamentally been more successful implementing ideas that first saw widespread adoption in Java. JSON is basically XML, which is what Java pushed so hard for for data exchange instead of really gross binary serialization formats.

Although, Java wasn't really trying to compete with C++ everywhere. It's just that, at the time, C++ was used at all levels. I mean, this was a time when it was C++, Visual Basic, or Turbo Pascal/Delphi for application programming. You couldn't easily get more abstract than that. That's wildly unlike today's landscape.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#68

Post by scubbo »

renewiltord wrote: post #41
w10-1 wrote: post #6

This is good and detailed, but misses a broader trend: how "worse is better" started to win - first Java over C++, then python and javascript over Java, and here markdown over Word and docbook. When markdown emerged, docbook was getting even more elaborate, and vendors everywhere had for decades been locking people into frameworks and languages with fantastic features that were hard to use -- and then the internet bu…

I'm sorry, what? Markdown over Word is "Worse is Better". You are shitting me. Markdown over Word is "Better is Better". Haha, dear god. MS Word? It must be some other word surely. MS Word is awful today.

You are misinterpreting the phrase. "Worse", here, means "having less functionality"[0]. Whatever your belief about the usability, speed, consistency, etc. of Microsoft Word (and we probably agree there!), Markdown is certainly "worse" in terms of features.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#69

Post by sheept »

Johnny_Bonk wrote: post #62

I'm fairly new to all this, but my understanding is that Markdown is great for a few reasons: It's just plain text, so no vendor lock-in and you can ripgrep/fzf/grep through it Lives happily in git repos with proper diffs LLMs speak it natively - they output Markdown, they understand Markdown input Way easier for agents to parse than PDFs (which are binary, layout-focused, tables turn to mush) Can do tables (at least…

(CommonMark) Markdown is a rough superset of HTML, like how YAML is a superset of JSON. So whatever can be expressed in HTML can also be expressed in Markdown. With the way the CommonMark spec is written, Markdown is effectively just an HTML preprocessor.

A major limitation of Markdown is the lack of standardization. For example, even within GFM there's multiple subtle variants: a single new line becomes a space when rendering Markdown files, but a line break in issue comments.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#70

Post by christophilus »

Havoc wrote: post #56

Sound write-up. It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text. No format/vendor lock-in and very amenable to living in a git repo. For my note taking that's already game over right there against everything else. I don't want to worry about whatever cursed format OneNote uses is still something I can extract in 2035. I also like that it's become a defacto standard that LLMs speak. I can tell i…

Same. I’m reading The UNIX Programming Environment (1984), and it’s made me want to use text for a lot more things. Proprietary formats come and go, but text is forever.
Post reply on HN