Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts • Hacker News Board

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#181

Post by DemocracyFTW2 » Fri, Oct 20, 2023, 10:39 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #137

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what latex has is a reasonable enough syntax that a human can write it by hand, unlike HTML+CSS. Moreover, the syntax, though clunky [1] is designed, as much as possible, to not interfere with the content that the human is writing I could not disagree more. LaTeX syntax is not 'clunky', it's a mess, and has intentionally been engineered right from the start to be clever rather than consistent. And it's not the synt…

> In order to use numerical codepoints to write 東京, you can write any of: There’s a simpler way: \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc} 東京

Or better still, use XeLaTeX. But that's not the point. The point is that (1) sometimes you don't want the literal codepoint but a numerical reference in your source code; a use case for this would be `　` instead of a literal ideographic space which might be useful to prevent it from being accidentally elided when at the end of the line.

(2) irrespective of whether you want to use numerical references or not, the example shows that apparently the authors of (La)TeX are unable to use sane syntaxes for their stuff. It's just a very bad idea to terminate your variable-length commands with a space when a space in the output could possibly follow. Same with identifiers: only letters are allowed, no underscores, no digits. You then get names like `\fooBarBazVI` instead of \foo_bar_baz_6 which many would prefer. These are all trifles to be sure, but they're legion, so you get a software that seemingly takes Death By a Thousand Papercuts as a positive design maxime.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#182

Post by glompers » Fri, Oct 20, 2023, 11:53 PM UTC

pseingatl wrote: post #127

manxman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cause git ain’t user friendly enough for lawyers and they use word not a plain text editor which doesnt make it easy to see the diffs. But yes ;)

Lawyers have gotten rid of secretaries and so spend time (and billing) futzing around with document formatting, fonts, margins, bullets, numbering, autonumbering and the like.

Many PEs (professional engineers) too.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#183

Post by smaudet » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 4:16 AM UTC

jsunderland323 wrote: post #157

Propelloni wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course this isn't and hasn't been true for quite some time. I'm the first to blast MS Word for being a total disaster (esp. templates, ie. style/substance separation, are bad) but it is no longer a locked-in platform. Even the docx format is only a zipped XML file. If you want, you can unpack the document file and put it into git. Thank you Open Document Foundation! On top of that, all contemporary word processors…

This 100%. It does get interesting when you get into non-plaintext things that have to somehow integrate into plaintext systems (git managed codebases). We've kind of left it up to CMS systems to handle the non-plaintext bits but this leads to many more orthogonal process problems. IMO, I think it really comes down to finding a universal mechanism for diffing and 3-way merging things that aren't plain text (document…

Git is popular because it's linear, and the linear paradigm usually translates well to serial things such as programs, instructions, document sets, etc.

It's actually bad at non-linear stuff, which you will have noticed if you have ever been working with hierarchical formats, especially e.g. xml or nested JSON.

Word is bad for a whole litany of reasons, but the reason it can't be easily versioned (atop the format being a literal Goldberg machine requiring inane transforms to properly) is that it encodes a bunch of non-linear formatting instructions. Sure, we can sort-of reason about this stuff e.g. with a hierarchical css+html+js structure, but without a way to render that I challenge you to be able to simply diff that information. Seeing "bold" or "blue" seems simple enough, as long as you also know to which elements it applies and in what layout. So, suddenly you can't reasonably diff the css file without also difficulty the html.

For programmers, we are used to reducing things by their dimensions into fairly linear spaces, this then helps us reason fairly linearly about changes, but doing this from any other context is challenging. Lawyers e.g. perhaps focus on the relations between various clauses, so linearizing their document flow is not very important to them, at least when there exists methods to diff the general textual content without investing much in how they are doing that.

As programmers we see the similarities to editing a code base and that excites us, however we do have a tendency to go off and write frameworks to parse and simplify these things, without ever actually bothering to learn to apply these things. This is not invaluable, but it's a different focus, which maybe explains why lawyers are not in the habit of using git.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#184

Post by pseingatl » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 4:16 AM UTC

esafak wrote: post #163

kwhitefoot wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to have word processors that exposed mark up. I wrote immense amounts of documentation in Wordstar on 8 bit machines and it was definitely more efficient than the WYSIWYG word processors that came later and faster even when the newer ones were running on much faster hardware. Something like Wordstar would be better than MarkDown.

WordPerfect called it Reveal Codes.

Which was wonderful. Some (many, a few, who knows?) lawyers have stuck with WordPerfect for this reason.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#185

Post by smaudet » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 4:22 AM UTC

manxman wrote: post #95

SanderNL wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Style and substance separation is easy and should be a requirement. Legal is pure text "programming" and what I mean is that the style of the text has zero bearing on the judicial process. The benefits of working at the proper level of abstraction compound. It enables tech like diffs and git, which then nicely solves a bunch of other problems as well. Using Word completely side-steps all those benefits. Sure, you get…

You are correct. But this is a culture issue. Culturally legal folk don’t see what they do as programming so they use different tools and work their processes their way. This is advantageous to outsiders who see through this! ;)

I think the main benefit would be to be able to represent yourself in court... otherwise there currently exist certain pratical and ethical hurdles to capitalizing into this, such as passing a bar exam (non-trivial), providing credentials, operating in the best interest of your client/society...etc.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#186

Post by smaudet » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 4:34 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #150

manxman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cause git ain’t user friendly enough for lawyers and they use word not a plain text editor which doesnt make it easy to see the diffs. But yes ;)

To me, that just calls for a sensible UI with attractive styling and interaction over a git backend for the heavy lifting of tracking changes through time. A lot of successful products have been built in this way. I've seen developers get upset with Apple for making successful products out of just giving a nice UI to a piece of open source tech that does the heavy lifting. Like it's cheating.

You should research what happened with distros and UI systems...open source was building lots of nice UIs and you could even have them on Windows/Mac, but the was constant drama over the "right" way to code a UI framework...which led to a ton of fracturing and leaning back towards minimalism (because the nice stuff was always very heavy).

This even happened with Microsoft, they had so many false starts and changes in messaging that they killed their own portfolios. I suspect at least that is why they "embraced linux" because it was excellent at web, and web wasn't busy changing every month (it has been, but that's a different story).

Apple introduced Swift but besides new Xcode versions I get the general impression their tooling has been far more stable.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#187

Post by smaudet » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 4:44 AM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #177

ska wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are comparing apples and oranges, at least a bit. The latex equivalent is \documentclass{article} \title{Natural selection in the Health and Retirement Study} \author{XXX} \date{\today} \begin{document} \begin{abstract} I investigate natural selection on polygenic scores in the contemporary US, using the Health and Retirement Study. Results partially support the economic theory of fertility as an explanation for…

It's absolutely true that you may need to customize things. And then you are stuck with the big quarto disadvantage: debugging a toolchain that typically looks like quarto -> knitr -> markdown -> pandoc -> [tex -> pdf | html] and not knowing exactly where the error came from. At the same time, the markdown defaults produce a nice, readable paper. The TeX defaults get you something that reminds you of Rubik's Cube and…

Is Lyx still around? I remember it had good defaults. Haven't used in ages and it had some installer issues but I got fairly comfortable writing latex papers without learning a ton of latex...

Ofc that was a major downside, something other markdown editors figured out - if you give people buttons that make it easy and you make it easy to learn, they will learn what they need.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#188

Post by smaudet » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 4:57 AM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #178

mr_mitm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your frustration. Maybe it helps to know where this problem comes from. TeX is extremely powerful and lets you create arbitrary documents. This is the first time I heard of quarto, but apparently it makes a lot of choices for you that you understandably don't really care about. Instead of developing quarto, one could have simply written a LaTeX class that defines a function like so: \newcommand{\image}[2…

Thanks for the help and I can feel the enthusiasm. I have to tell you, my hatred for TeX is profound and goes far beyond this one point. But if I start ranting, I'll never stop.

Didn't you say with quarto you had to debug a 5 layer pipeline? I wonder if it's not biasing you here a bit...(stuck fighting "arcane" latex syntax somewhere at 3 in the morning).

I'm not saying you should love TeX, but it's a bit like saying you hate assembly language - if you have the wrong abstractions (writing a 3D game or a web page using assembly language) of course the experience will be beyond frustrating. I don't hate assembly language, but I generally don't need to touch it because higher order abstractions generally suffice. If I am optimizing my compiler output, though, then it's a tool I can use.

Ofc if I have the wrong or missing tools while using assembly language, or any other TBH (python, html, etc), that is also a source of considerable frustration. Not sure where the "hatred" comes from, but perhaps you encountered a poorly done package or editor?

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#189

Post by smaudet » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 5:29 AM UTC

eviks wrote: post #125

mr_mitm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said: Maybe you want to specify a different placement option like `b` instead of `t`. Maybe you don't want the label equal to the file path, in particular if you happen to include an image twice. Or you don't want it centered. Or you want several images in one figure environment arranged in some way. Or you want to scale the included image to fit only 70% of the page width. Or maybe you want to rotate the includ…

And as I replied: how does any of this *prevent* you from "cover[ing] as many usecases as possible" given that writing the original code is always an option?

Namespaces and constraints.

The first (namespaces) contrast speed (brevity) and specificity (verbosity). Namespacing (long names) are great when you don't have a good idea the full scope - putting your library in namespace means you generally never have to be concerned that terms will overlap.

Macros tend to be the opposite - short, in global namespace, with little flexibility. They constrain the possible output by focusing on a certain goal - this is the point of the macro usually, to avoid some common pitfall without being overly verbose.

If you combine the two, you have a problem - either the macro dictates your preference, or many different macros must exist which, usually being brief or in pursuit of similar goals, will result in namespace collisions.

So of course you can define them, but generally this is better suited towards a specific use case or organization.

Or at least that's the idea. I'm not sure some standard approachable macros are a bad thing, as long as you can redefine them later or pick and choose, but I do get the point of "why not", because they don't want to constrain the language itself. The irony is other systems do this for them and tex becomes more an outsider thing and systems like markdown are far more constrained...

On the other hand there is no way to make everyone happy, and I respect the Tex author decision to opt for a less-is-more strategy wrt to offering building blocks only not templates.

You are of course free to build your template library, and make it popular, but be forewarned that likely whatever it is popular at doing (say, writing science articles), will affect what TeX is used primarily for. Which is the "why".

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#190

Post by svnt » Sat, Oct 21, 2023, 5:34 AM UTC

breuleux wrote: post #78

wcrichton wrote: post #46

Hi, Nota creator here. A high-level comment: After developing the initial prototype you see in the webpage, I've since gone back to the drawing board. I'm working on developing a firmer foundation for issues like: - How do you interleave content and computation? See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04368 - How do different syntaxes make different document tasks easy, hard, or impossible? See: https://github.com/cognitive-…

If you want another data point, I made my own markup language a while back that aims for markdown-like simplicity while making it easy to define simple macros and operators: http://breuleux.github.io/quaint/ It's pretty extensive. I still use it for my own writing, although I'm probably the only one.

Do you have an example of a document where it’s special features are more heavily used? Most of the posts I saw were basically just paragraphs and italicized sections.