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Other than inertia, what is keeping AsciiDoc from overtaking Markdown? Personally I like the ubiquity and simplicity of Markdown, but I can also see the benefi

Other than inertia, what is keeping AsciiDoc from overtaking Markdown? Personally I like the ubiquity and simplicity of Markdown, but I can also see the benefits of the features AsciiDoc has to offer.

xeonmc 2y ago
Ruby.
- pindab0ter 2y ago
  What do you mean? Is Ruby helping or preventing AsciiDoc from becoming more widespread?
  - everforward 2y ago
    I think preventing. I don't think Ruby is a bad language, but I've never worked anywhere it was a first or even second class language. I like AsciiDoc, but it's a hard sell to convince people to manage an entire other language toolchain used for nothing but AsciiDoc. I don't think the distro packaged it, or maybe not a recent enough version, but I could be wrong. It's already hard enough to get people to switch documentation formats, needing to manage another language for it is just a bridge too far everywhere I've worked. It would be an easier sell if it were statically compiled, or at least in an interpreted language we already used (Python or JS most places).
latexr 2y ago
> Other than inertia Why does there need to be something else? That’s a powerful reason. Markdown is subpar and has an awful steward—as evidenced by all the different “flavours” and degrees of support in existence—but we somehow made it work in a jumble of hacks and that’s what we have now. It’s crummy but gets the job done. Even if AsciiDoc is technically superior, which it probably is, is it superior enough to justify the big players implementing and pushing for in more in places regular users have access too?
Freak_NL 2y ago
The name doesn't help. ASCII, by way of that character encoding standard, implies that dark age before writing and transmitting 'café' or 'Warschauer Straße' or '€10' or '¡olé!' just worked. Not a great marketing point. So the first thing you are wondering when you read 'AsciiDoc' is, “Wait, does this mean it doesn't support anything but ASCII characters?”, regardless of whether or not that is true.
somat 2y ago
Opposing goals, the purpose of markdown is to have a nice looking plain text document that can be automatically typeset and asciidoc is to have a well structured plain text document that can be automaticly typeset. Note that markdown's whole value proposition is that it is a nice looking plaintext format, it stinks at adding any sort of semantic value to a document. realistically if you care about your documentation you will use something better than markdown. The problem is adding better structure always makes the plain text ugly and hard to read, violating the whole point of markdown. that is to say, the many efforts to add better semantics to markdown don't appear to understand the point of markdown.

xeonmc 2y ago

Ruby.

pindab0ter 2y ago
What do you mean? Is Ruby helping or preventing AsciiDoc from becoming more widespread?
- everforward 2y ago
  I think preventing. I don't think Ruby is a bad language, but I've never worked anywhere it was a first or even second class language. I like AsciiDoc, but it's a hard sell to convince people to manage an entire other language toolchain used for nothing but AsciiDoc. I don't think the distro packaged it, or maybe not a recent enough version, but I could be wrong. It's already hard enough to get people to switch documentation formats, needing to manage another language for it is just a bridge too far everywhere I've worked. It would be an easier sell if it were statically compiled, or at least in an interpreted language we already used (Python or JS most places).

latexr 2y ago

> Other than inertia Why does there need to be something else? That’s a powerful reason. Markdown is subpar and has an awful steward—as evidenced by all the different “flavours” and degrees of support in existence—but we somehow made it work in a jumble of hacks and that’s what we have now. It’s crummy but gets the job done. Even if AsciiDoc is technically superior, which it probably is, is it superior enough to justify the big players implementing and pushing for in more in places regular users have access too?

Freak_NL 2y ago

The name doesn't help. ASCII, by way of that character encoding standard, implies that dark age before writing and transmitting 'café' or 'Warschauer Straße' or '€10' or '¡olé!' just worked. Not a great marketing point. So the first thing you are wondering when you read 'AsciiDoc' is, “Wait, does this mean it doesn't support anything but ASCII characters?”, regardless of whether or not that is true.

somat 2y ago

Opposing goals, the purpose of markdown is to have a nice looking plain text document that can be automatically typeset and asciidoc is to have a well structured plain text document that can be automaticly typeset. Note that markdown's whole value proposition is that it is a nice looking plaintext format, it stinks at adding any sort of semantic value to a document. realistically if you care about your documentation you will use something better than markdown. The problem is adding better structure always makes the plain text ugly and hard to read, violating the whole point of markdown. that is to say, the many efforts to add better semantics to markdown don't appear to understand the point of markdown.