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Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
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Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#22I would be interested in a comparison between this and Jupyter notebooks. Notebooks seem like they'd be easier to use than a specific language for most users.
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#23> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. PDFs were designed to mirror physical documents, so they impose the real-world constraints of paper: page breaks, fixed width, and immutable styling. Web pages, by contrast, provides an essential dynamism. Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it…
> I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug. I couldn't agree more. Dynamism is great for web _apps_, but it's the last thing I want in a document
Do you object to the interactive Vega widget? https://nota-lang.org/reference.html#def-section-1.1
Reputable scientific journals now post videos online alongside their articles. Interactivity is even better for understanding. But permanence is an issue I suppose.
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#24If you follow the links, I think https://willcrichton.net/nota/ makes a compelling argument for the benefits of Nota at least in the niche of its intended use-case: making programming language academic papers more understandable.
As mentioned in another comment, rendering to high-quality PDF is an obvious need/question: can it do that?
(Perhaps) better would be rendering to LaTeX for compatibility with existing system.
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#25Basically this is markup + code (Javascript), which is a combination targeted by MDX. The last time someone mentioned this, the author said Nota is geared towards documentation, while MDX is geared towards web sites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31349579 If that is so, I think someone needs to wrap Nota into a product for it to take off. Because while the results look great, fiddling with node.js to build a d…
The fact that Nota comes with a default style (some kind of article style) already puts it in a completely different league than MDX. MDX is ready, willing, and able to use whatever React/Vue/etc framework you use, but that means it doesn't come with any opinions out of the box. Nota feels to me like it could be plugged in to a static site generator. Except then you have to get the two to cooperate. Still, I think th…
Yeah this looks like a sensible extension to Markdown in a way I quite like the look of. Might be worth spending some time plugging it into Nikola (which does one thing I like really well - let's me blog as iPython notebooks, but that's not always appropriate).
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#26> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. PDFs were designed to mirror physical documents, so they impose the real-world constraints of paper: page breaks, fixed width, and immutable styling. Web pages, by contrast, provides an essential dynamism. Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it…
> I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug. I couldn't agree more. Dynamism is great for web _apps_, but it's the last thing I want in a document
OK but then what is the thing in the middle, between documents and applications?
There are fantastic, beautiful interactive experiences (for lack of a better word) that are obviously not documents (they can't be represented on paper, there is code running) but they're not really applications, either (they are fully offline, self-contained, state that's only evident on the page).
But they are, universally: dynamic.
Examples: - https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ - http://worrydream.com/TenBrighterIdeas/ - even : https://neal.fun/space-elevator/
This is what I think the future of textbooks and presentations should be. But I think part of the problem is that not only do we not have tools geared toward creating them, we don't even have a name for these things. If we say "document", they flunk the pdf test. If we say "web application", they are lumped into the same lumbering category as office docs and enterprise software.
Maybe Nota is a step in the right direction. But it'd be an even better step if it didn't call itself "21st century documents", if for no other reason than to defend against the valid criticism you levied against it.
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#27> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. PDFs were designed to mirror physical documents, so they impose the real-world constraints of paper: page breaks, fixed width, and immutable styling. Web pages, by contrast, provides an essential dynamism. Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it…
Yeah; I mean do knock down the page breaks, but don't go overboard with the dynamism.
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#28I was just thinking about what the easiest way would be to create a blog with mostly static content but with room for interactive graphs or arbitrary customization if i want it. Is this a good option?
Another option I saw was Quarto [1]. Maybe even a simple static site blog like Jekyll can be used as well where i just edit the output HTML as needed? What do you all recommend?
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#29So: * More in the space of LaTeX than Markdown (but with elements of each). * Written in JavaScript (so lots of of people can contribute in a language they already know). * MIT license. Nice! I don't know that I have an immediate use for it today, but this looks super nifty. If I did want to write something that needed some LaTeX-y features, and wasn't aiming for publication in a place that required it, I'd give Nota…
TeX was definitely groundbreaking, but I consider it a product of its time. Far too much cleverness in macro expansions and weaving tricks to keep memory usage in check for what are now laughable limits. Missing far too many niceties in comparison to modern languages with more guardrails to protect yourself from silly mistakes. The only way I can write Latex is to heavily rely upon \input{} segments to keep isolated…
There are plenty of these markup languages. The reason none of them really challenge tex/latex in its own space, is that they don't aim to do what tex/latex does.
Latex is "typographically-complete". Markdown and friends are explicitly not. HTML+CSS is. But 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.
For instance, Latex uses curly brackets {} for macro arguments, because they are least used brackets for content. So when you are reading a latex source, you know that () and [] are content, and only {} are ambiguous [2]. Nota, uses a mix of all three brackets for its syntax, causing additional pain for the person reading/writing the source.
The replacement for TeX/latex is never going to a simpler language. It is going to a language just as complex as latex. But it can definitely be cleaned up and sped up compared to latex. IMHO, somebody should write tex from scratch, improve it's syntax but otherwise keep it largely unchanged. Basically, any plain latex source using some of the popular packages should continue to compile and give the same output. That is the only reasonable way out.
[1] A typographically-complete language will never have a non-clunky syntax.
[2] Escaped brackets \{1,2,3 \} are literal curly brackets. Personally, I only use them for mathematical sets and have defined a macro \set, so in my documents {} are 99% not ambiguous.
Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts
#30> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. PDFs were designed to mirror physical documents, so they impose the real-world constraints of paper: page breaks, fixed width, and immutable styling. Web pages, by contrast, provides an essential dynamism. Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it…
I think some basic dynamism is still necessary to make reading pdf on small screens comfortable (e.g. mobile). When on mobile, I vastly prefer reading webpages over pdf because most reasonable webpage should be able to fit mobile screen.