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

101–110 of 353 posts

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#101

Post by morshu9001 »

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…

My "worse is better" is using plain text instead of markdown. I still have no idea how newlines work in markdown.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#102

Post by esjeon »

chuckadams wrote: post #60

The author of CommonMark and Pandoc has a new format called Djot: https://djot.net/ that I've been meaning to check out. Supposedly more sane to parse, and it comes from someone who would definitely know about that sort of thing.

A little bit of a problem, as a Korean, is that the name “djot” (and also common word “jot”) sounds like a Korean slang for “dick” :/

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#103

Post by morshu9001 »

calmbonsai wrote: post #55
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…

As someone who was immersed in C++ from the original Stroustrup book (I do not recommend it), then transitioned to Java, then (largely) to Python I disagree on the language comparison. - Java is not worse than C++, it's actually better for most large-scale programming - A (subset) of C++ is still far better for performance-intensive applications (games, low-level systems software, avionics, etc.). - Related to previo…

IMO JS and its spinoffs made mostly the best choices for an interpreted language. The bad parts are pretty inconsequential, and the good parts are important things other langs didn't do well. Even Rust took after how it does async and package management.

Better than Python which also recently started copying over JS decisions, except that Py was easier to use with C libs from the start which made it capture math/data/science usage earlier.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#104

Post by lozf »

pbronez wrote: post #37
adamnemecek wrote: post #11

Markdown was cool for a while. I have switched to typst and boy is that an improvement. It’s the love child of latex and markdown. With markdown you’d still have to embed latex, while typst has its own thing that is nicer than latex.

I've been enjoying Typst. I worry that much of it is too complex for many end users. I'm musing about having end users draft stuff in markdown, then render that markdown with Typst templates.

Good call, I've had success with:

     pandoc -f gfm -t typst -o file.typ file.md
and as you'll know it's easy to add a Template if required.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#105

Post by zeppelin101 »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #87
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…

Except there's a massive lack of Markdown VIEWERS. You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended. So you wind up looking at them as plain text, with a bunch of formatting characters in them. What's the point, then? Only just now has Windows Notepad been revised to render Markdown (I think it does now, anyway). And after searching for a Mac…

I'm personally a huge fan of Typora. It's available on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#106

Post by tomeraberbach »

data-ottawa wrote: post #98
tomeraberbach wrote: post #93

I added Markdown support to Google Docs as a 20% project. Honestly honored to be included in this Markdown history :)

This was a great addition. That and using `alt+/` to open options/command palette are my favourite features, but you single handedly made Google Docs spark joy for me

So glad to hear!

And yup, the command palette search change was awesome. Can't take credit for that one though haha

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#108

Post by tomeraberbach »

nvader wrote: post #97
edoceo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it almost daily. Thanks!

Seconded. @tomraberbach, today in conversation someone mentioned Paul Buchheit's invention of Gmail as a 20% project. The next time, I'll mention you!

Heh I think the scale is a bit different, but I'm honored :)

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#109

Post by nvader »

tomeraberbach wrote: post #108
nvader wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. @tomraberbach, today in conversation someone mentioned Paul Buchheit's invention of Gmail as a 20% project. The next time, I'll mention you!

Heh I think the scale is a bit different, but I'm honored :)

It's not a typical day for me, but I sent 0 emails (Gmail is my standard) but edited 2 Docs with Markdown.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#110

Post by tomeraberbach »

nvader wrote: post #109
tomeraberbach wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh I think the scale is a bit different, but I'm honored :)

It's not a typical day for me, but I sent 0 emails (Gmail is my standard) but edited 2 Docs with Markdown.

Well that's awesome!

Out of curiosity, do you mean the "autocomplete" feature or the import/export/copy/paste feature? (I did both)

Post reply on HN