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

Pollen: the book is a program

docs.racket-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 97 posts

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#51

Post by vanderZwan »

munificent wrote: post #47
wodenokoto wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also advocate not using underline to denote links. In his practical typography book he practically hides all hyperlinks. I also find his redesigns of documentation pages uninviting to read. I find Butterick to be a passionate, opinionated, hard working, but ultimately a poor designer.

> He also advocate not using underline to denote links. >In his practical typography book he practically hides all hyperlinks. I think that's a fine, defensible stylistic choice. When reading a paragraph of prose, I find it INTERRUPTS MY FLOW if there is a jarring style change in the middle of a sentence, as in this one. The visual style of a hyperlink is only relevant to the point that you know the hyperlink is ther…

> When you mouse over the paragraph, which indicates you are intending to click, the contrast increases.

What would you suggest in the case of touchscreens? Increased contrast while scrolling with a slow fade-out afterwards?

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#52

Post by kuschku »

Xophmeister wrote: post #49
kuschku wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a racket-ism to use unicode characters wherever possible, yes. Racket by default also doesn’t use the keyword "lambda", but instead uses "λ". You can obviously use something different, if you want to, but the default, and recommended solution, is using unicode characters. As Racket is frequently written in the DrRacket IDE, this also makes sense.

> Racket by default also doesn’t use the keyword "lambda", but instead uses "λ". I'm not sure that's true: Welcome to Racket v6.10.1. > (define foo (lambda (x) (+ x 1))) > (foo 1) 2

As I mentioned, both are possible, but (λ ...) is strictly preferred.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#53

Post by Chiba-City »

This looks lovely and near perfect. But what happened to Docbook? I worry about tool longevity and thus ongoing editability of source assets. I imagine groff still might grind old tbl and nroff and docs into Postscript.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#54

Post by Tehnix »

peatmoss wrote: post #23
Tehnix wrote: post #6

Hmm, is there a cheatsheet or crash course for it? Not particularly interested in reading a book just to get my editing game on. Just throw me in the deep water with the basics, and then I'll jump around to what I need. Would consider using this instead of LaTeX for my thesis, but not so much if the time investment is too much.

If your university has requirements around formatting (most do), then you'll likely spend many hours making anything that isn't LaTeX (or, blech, Word) do the right thing. For a thesis, your best case is to just use a university provided LaTeX template and then spend as little time bike shedding as humanly possible.

Luckily they don’t :) My Bsc thesis I did in a template another student had made years ago, which swims around, but honestly LaTeX is quite tedious and time wasting to write in for most non math heavy content, which is why I’d prefer something else, that stills allows the same flexibility if needed.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#56

Post by jcelerier »

SwellJoe wrote: post #10

It's interesting to see a somewhat widespread shift away from the separation of code, templates, styles, and text model of publishing things (mostly websites, but most publishing can be boiled down to that if you squint), where code/templates/style get merged into one. React does this. Pollen seemingly takes it even further and sticks the text in the code, too. Or, rather sticks the code in the text, I guess. It's a…

> "Separation of concerns" is still a thing everybody wants to do

Separation of concerns was a problem twenty years ago when source code looked like [this](https://github.com/kmainyu/EveHQ/blob/c3406c9cffca744500213f...). Since then the tools & languages have reached, maybe not the optimal abstraction level, but at least damn close to it. Everything is here to build apps as fast as possible ; the only thing left to do is write the actual software.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#57

Post by a3n »

"the book is a program"

Quibble after scanning, but the book as produced appears to be a standard web page, no more or less a "program" than any other web page.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#58

Post by baldfat »

a3n wrote: post #57

"the book is a program" Quibble after scanning, but the book as produced appears to be a standard web page, no more or less a "program" than any other web page.

Quibble all ebooks were produced by programs in a computer?

Your looking at it as if the output is the programming piece. Heck markdown outputs to HTML. You wouldn't look at markdown as a programming language in the general sense?

Look a little closer my friend and you will see that this is very unique and special.

"Pollen gives you access to a full programming language (Racket) with a text-based syntax that makes it easy to embed code within your documents."

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#59

Post by unkown-unknowns »

wiz21c wrote: post #37

Is it me or this is like Knuth's Literate Programming ?

The idea of literate programming is to write explanations of programs in human language as the primary form of communicating what a program does to others.

OP link is about using code to create a document.

Probably you could use OP tool to write literate programs but that is not the primary intention.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#60

Post by a3n »

baldfat wrote: post #58
a3n wrote: post #57

"the book is a program" Quibble after scanning, but the book as produced appears to be a standard web page, no more or less a "program" than any other web page.

Quibble all ebooks were produced by programs in a computer? Your looking at it as if the output is the programming piece. Heck markdown outputs to HTML. You wouldn't look at markdown as a programming language in the general sense? Look a little closer my friend and you will see that this is very unique and special. "Pollen gives you access to a full programming language (Racket) with a text-based syntax that makes it…

Sure, it goes farther than, say, Pandoc, in giving you access to an underlying programming environment as a writer.

But to double down on my quibble, when I go into a bookstore, or on O'Reilly (or now, Amazon, sniff), what's on offer are books. Even if on github and similar, what's on offer there is source of various languages and markup, which go to produce a book.

I just can't see any final, static rendering of source as a "program." I would consider Stephenson's Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, or anything that aspires to that, as a program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

Post reply on HN