4 ms·

"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

• baldfat 9y ago
  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."
  • a3n 9y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
• contravariant 9y ago
  I was kind of hoping for a Knut's "The TEXbook" kind of "the book is a program". Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be.