On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 07:50:10AM +0200, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> On 29/08/16 21:47, Yuriy Tymchuk wrote:
>
> [...]
> >
> >
> > > It pains me that we are editing Pillar in outside tools, and now we
> > > should no longer have to do that. Of course, this is not the most
> > > ideal tool support for Pillar but I think it is a reasonable start.
> >
> > To make things sadder: when I need to write some short “richish" I’m
> > using markdown instead for pillar because in ATOM I can open the
> > rendered version of my document that will update while i type (and will
> > display images and so on). It could be nice to have the same
> > functionality in Pharo, but I’m really busy with improving other parts.
> > Additionally I’m not sure that it makes sense to reimplement rich text
> > editor in Pharo.
> >
> > Uko
> >
>
> For me it would be really nice to have this kind of support for markdown.
> That's the language I'm using for writing my PhD thesis in Pharo, and in
> fact now that I'm in hackademia Summer School[1] is nice to find some other
> PhD students that in fact are using markdown in their writing.
>
> [1]
> http://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/cdc/digital-cultures-research-lab/events/summer-school-2016.html
>
> Having syntax highlighting and graphics preview for markdown would be a way
> to introduce some new non-technical users and researchers to the Pharo
> world, reproducible research, interactive documentation and modable tools,
> but we need to start in a place they know, for example its markup language.
I don't really see the benefit of pushing Markdown into Pharo at _this moment_
(there is PetitParser for some flavor of md though).
If you want to use Markdown, then there is already fifteen billion of other
tools outside.
If you want deep integration with Pharo, then that takes a lot of effort, which
is being invested into Pillar, because Pillar is aiming to be a much more
powerful format --- maybe one day comparable to reStructuredText and to what
Python does with rst/sphinx.
Don't forget that markdown, although an excellent markup for what it knows, is
also very simplistic.
So if you want to use Markdown for PhD, then you are actually not using
markdown, but most likely pandoc (or some richer syntax, such as scholarly
markdown)... and support for either is another order of magnitude more complex.
Bottom line(s):
* there's a continuous investment into improvement and deep integration
of Pillar
* not enough resources to go around and implement any notation
* Markdown is too simplistic for any advanced writing (and yes, I used
it to write papers and my thesis, but it also includes pandoc and many
make/bash/ruby scripts to hack around)
Peter
