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Having had to write in Scribble, Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, and a other similar environments, I'm very surprised everyone is that excited about Scribble. It's not b

by acbart 10y ago

Having had to write in Scribble, Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, and a other similar environments, I'm very surprised everyone is that excited about Scribble. It's not bad, but it was never a game changer for me. Is it just because of the ability to use LISP macros? Is that really that big a deal for you? Personally, I really like Jinja2 for my dynamic sites, MarkDown for writing static documents quickly, and LaTeX for anything where a professional document should be created. What do you think is the major advantage of Scribble?

capnrefsmmat 10y ago
It's similar to the appeal of LaTeX: you can write macros (ordinary Racket functions) to do common things. I could build on Scribble to make an online textbook, for example, with cross-referenced theorems and definitions, by defining some extra Scribble functions. Except, unlike LaTeX, you have a sane programming language instead of hairy macros. Pollen takes Scribble and strips out much of the structure, leaving a very interesting core: http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/
brudgers 10y ago
The abstraction behind Scribble is to treat documentation as a compilation phase analogous to Racket's macro-expansion phases. Matthew Flatt talks about it in this video: https://vimeo.com/6630691 https://vimeo.com/6630691 He wrote Scribble to scratch his own itch...or rather remove his own pain from having to maintain LaTeX based documentation for Racket/MzScheme. To me, the proof is in the pudding: Racket's documentation is exceptionally good pretty much from top to bottom despite the breadth of projects that fall within the standard download.
branchly2 10y ago
For professional looking docs, you can still write them in Markdown, and then have Pandoc process them into LaTeX. Pandoc even lets you put raw LaTeX commands into your Markdown.
smartmic 10y ago
The possibility to have a fully-fledged programming language under the hood gives Scribble definitely an edge. Btw, the same is basically true for Luatex. But I think the expressiveness of Scheme might be more suitable for documentation purposes than that of Lua.

by acbart 10y ago

capnrefsmmat 10y ago

It's similar to the appeal of LaTeX: you can write macros (ordinary Racket functions) to do common things. I could build on Scribble to make an online textbook, for example, with cross-referenced theorems and definitions, by defining some extra Scribble functions. Except, unlike LaTeX, you have a sane programming language instead of hairy macros. Pollen takes Scribble and strips out much of the structure, leaving a very interesting core: http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

brudgers 10y ago

The abstraction behind Scribble is to treat documentation as a compilation phase analogous to Racket's macro-expansion phases. Matthew Flatt talks about it in this video: https://vimeo.com/6630691 https://vimeo.com/6630691 He wrote Scribble to scratch his own itch...or rather remove his own pain from having to maintain LaTeX based documentation for Racket/MzScheme. To me, the proof is in the pudding: Racket's documentation is exceptionally good pretty much from top to bottom despite the breadth of projects that fall within the standard download.

branchly2 10y ago

For professional looking docs, you can still write them in Markdown, and then have Pandoc process them into LaTeX. Pandoc even lets you put raw LaTeX commands into your Markdown.

smartmic 10y ago

The possibility to have a fully-fledged programming language under the hood gives Scribble definitely an edge. Btw, the same is basically true for Luatex. But I think the expressiveness of Scheme might be more suitable for documentation purposes than that of Lua.