Offray et al, Cheers to all who want to add more Markdown capabilities to Pharo. As a relatively new user who thinks Pharo is one of the coolest systems on Earth, I would love to see such. I don’t think it is a coincidence that so many new apps/language/etc. brag about Markdown capabilities (e.g., R lets you write Markdown, Stata—a stats DSL—has increased its Markdown capabilities, Jupyter Notebook/Lab has Markdown cells to make writing reproducible analyses easier, Apple’s Swift has added Markdown-derived documenting features, the iThought mind-mapping program uses Markdown for formatting, etc.). Despite the diversity of flavors and certain limitations, Markdown has (Markdowns have??) clearly become a lingua franca for the larger programming community. Other humane markup systems like ReStructuredText seem to be more narrow in appeal (e.g., RST in Python). My personal hunch is that popularity comes from its ease to write, read as plain text and process using any toolchain aimed at plain text.
Many of the things I’ve come to love about Pharo—images, coding and browsing in the System Browser, the versioning system—are, frankly, barriers to entry for the novice. Taking Pillar’s strengths and role in making Pharo more self-contained as given, it is still one more barrier to entry. How great it would be to provide an easier entry path via Markdown, even if we expect/hope folks will move to Pillar when they need more and have built up some overall comfort!!! Also, the GFM dialect of Markdown is a key part of the Github ecosystem. So, Markdown would seem to have at least symbolic—and perhaps practical—synergies with efforts to integrate with Git. Of somewhat less importance, there is an image factor. I personally haven’t seen tremendous value in having a Markdown parser in Python, Swift, GoLang, Racket, etc., but it seems like every language except COBOL and, maybe, BrainF**k now has a Markdown parser. Lastly, I sense a concern that Markdown might displace Pillar for many users, draining energy away from it. On the one hand, that would indicate that it was better serving the needs of, say, 80% of the users despite being less capable than Pillar. On the other hand, what to do for the remaining 20% is a legitimate concern. On the third hand, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good often doesn’t work out well. Which dialect of Markdown gets used seems less important than being able to handle **a** dialect, whichever it is. If Offray is going to do the work, seems like it is his choice. (That said, I’m *really* fond of the Pandoc dialect, even if GFM is most synergistic with Git-ward momentum.) Many thanks to all for their past, current and future efforts on both Markdown and Pillar. Glenn Sent from my iPad > On Dec 30, 2017, at 1:18 PM, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Sean, > > I don't think there is any conflict between having Pillar and Markdown > support inside Pharo. I tried to explain myself as many times as I can, > but time and again when Markdown gets mentioned, the next is "we already > have Pillar" and then a holy war restarts because someone wants another > markup system supported. All the old arguments for Pillar are mentioned > and all about (Pandoc's) Markdown ignored and we, the community, rinse > an repeat as a broken record. > > At least this time I know about support existing CommonMark. So maybe in > 100 to 1000 iterations more of the above community cycle, we could have > a versatile playground supporting at least two documentation markup > systems and will be closer to a rich text/document editor system on Pharo. > > Cheers, > > Offray > > >> On 30/12/17 14:58, Sean P. DeNigris wrote: >> Stephane Ducasse-3 wrote >>> Pillar is not about syntax but about the text model and all the visitors. >> Ah! Good to know. I was also confused on this point. Since we don't yet have >> a rich text editor, I only ever see static markup and static exports. I >> should take a deeper look. >> >> That said, is there really a conflict with what Offray is saying/doing? IIUC >> he wants to create a Markdown parser, which presumable could be used to >> import into the Pillar model (I would assume when the tools become >> attractive enough to encourage this) and back out to Markdown for >> interoperability, no? Or am I missing something? >> >> >> >> ----- >> Cheers, >> Sean >> -- >> Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html >> >> > > >
