4 ms·

Fairly long-time Emacser/Lisper here. Personally I've never bothered mastering org-mode; using Emacs has never been a goal in itself for me. In practice, org-m

by vemv 5y ago

Fairly long-time Emacser/Lisper here. Personally I've never bothered mastering org-mode; using Emacs has never been a goal in itself for me. In practice, org-mode in a team context barely scales because: * it's a practically unparseable language: all interop libs (like those found for Clojure, Ruby, Haskell, etc) seem to have severe limitations parsing/emitting org-mode. * Related to the previous point, it means one can't create .org files automatedly, from a CI pipeline. This makes it hard to have documentation guaranteedly up-to-date, out of a codebase. * Sooner or later, at least a few people in a team won't be exactly org-mode fans (even in all-Emacs teams; I've belonged to a few). * Lastly, github itself doesn't excel at rendering .org files - one can still find artifacts. My take would be that if org-mode works for you - awesome! But please consider the impact of introducing it at work. Early successes can be deceiving.

JoelMcCracken 5y ago
Honestly, I agree. I understand that pandoc can convert to/from org files, but I'm sure that conversion is lossy (i don't know how it could possibly not be). I love org mode, but i think its best used by individuals. Now maybe if someone decided to standardize it, things would be different, but as it stands, don't use it on teams. However, for your own, personal stuff, i think its great. For example I use org-roam to manage my knowledge base. This is an inherently personal pursuit so I'm not worried about using it for this purpose.
alpaca128 5y ago
Org-Mode is a great concept but looking at the syntax you can see its age. I think it would be cool to have a format comparable to Markdown but with support for a JSON-like object notation that supports the linking of any metadata to any part of the text. That would make it simpler and let users add their own properties which would then be just ignored by other parsers. The problem with such things is of course that we already have what feels like a hundred different Markdown variants, each one slightly different and incompatible with the others in some way. That is in fact the reason I started using .org in the first place as a Vim user (that and the LaTeX code support).
- taeric 5y ago
  I cringe at the thought of json. Org can look cumbersome, but only in documents that I posit would be cumbersome in any format. Though, I suspect that down that road ultimately leads to some form of xml with cdata style escapes for thorns.
  - skrtskrt 5y ago
    you cringe at the thought of json but not xml?
    - taeric 5y ago
      Honestly, yeah. But mainly because I don't see xml getting picked. Xml is at least a markup language. Json is not. Encoding a document with it is terrible. Just look at Jupyter some time.
      - alpaca128 5y ago
        I never suggested encoding a document in JSON. I would use a similar syntax for annotations of text elements. Both Markdown and Org support similar things(e.g. tagging a heading) but with inconsistent, inflexible syntax. I don't think anything beats JSON in that area, definitely not XML. Specifically I'd prefer something along the lines of JSON5 for the sake of sanity, which is just better for human-readable and editable content.
        taeric 5y ago
        I don't see what json gets you that a standard delimited tag didn't get. Such that org's footnote tags already work well here. Or just... Hyperlinks in general. What would you use json to encode that https://foo/baz https://foo/baz shouldn't already handle? And, if you ack that links are already links, the standard of either [display](link) or [[display][link]] seems as nice as json could possibly get.
        5y ago
Siira 5y ago
Emitting org-mode is extremely easy (obviously, or otherwise people couldn’t write it). I myself have not needed complex parsing of them, but simple regexes and perl scripts have served my needs. This is especially true when you impose some structure on your text. In the worst case scenario, you should be able to just use the elisp code itself to parse the file. There already are exporters to most other common formats.

by vemv 5y ago

JoelMcCracken 5y ago

Honestly, I agree. I understand that pandoc can convert to/from org files, but I'm sure that conversion is lossy (i don't know how it could possibly not be). I love org mode, but i think its best used by individuals. Now maybe if someone decided to standardize it, things would be different, but as it stands, don't use it on teams. However, for your own, personal stuff, i think its great. For example I use org-roam to manage my knowledge base. This is an inherently personal pursuit so I'm not worried about using it for this purpose.

alpaca128 5y ago

Org-Mode is a great concept but looking at the syntax you can see its age. I think it would be cool to have a format comparable to Markdown but with support for a JSON-like object notation that supports the linking of any metadata to any part of the text. That would make it simpler and let users add their own properties which would then be just ignored by other parsers. The problem with such things is of course that we already have what feels like a hundred different Markdown variants, each one slightly different and incompatible with the others in some way. That is in fact the reason I started using .org in the first place as a Vim user (that and the LaTeX code support).

taeric 5y ago
I cringe at the thought of json. Org can look cumbersome, but only in documents that I posit would be cumbersome in any format. Though, I suspect that down that road ultimately leads to some form of xml with cdata style escapes for thorns.
- skrtskrt 5y ago
  you cringe at the thought of json but not xml?
  - taeric 5y ago
    Honestly, yeah. But mainly because I don't see xml getting picked. Xml is at least a markup language. Json is not. Encoding a document with it is terrible. Just look at Jupyter some time.
    - alpaca128 5y ago
      I never suggested encoding a document in JSON. I would use a similar syntax for annotations of text elements. Both Markdown and Org support similar things(e.g. tagging a heading) but with inconsistent, inflexible syntax. I don't think anything beats JSON in that area, definitely not XML. Specifically I'd prefer something along the lines of JSON5 for the sake of sanity, which is just better for human-readable and editable content.
      - taeric 5y ago
        I don't see what json gets you that a standard delimited tag didn't get. Such that org's footnote tags already work well here. Or just... Hyperlinks in general. What would you use json to encode that https://foo/baz https://foo/baz shouldn't already handle? And, if you ack that links are already links, the standard of either [display](link) or [[display][link]] seems as nice as json could possibly get.
        5y ago

Siira 5y ago

Emitting org-mode is extremely easy (obviously, or otherwise people couldn’t write it). I myself have not needed complex parsing of them, but simple regexes and perl scripts have served my needs. This is especially true when you impose some structure on your text. In the worst case scenario, you should be able to just use the elisp code itself to parse the file. There already are exporters to most other common formats.