You hit several birds with one single mail. 2017-08-14 13:34 GMT-03:00 Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works>:
Jimmie et al. nicely reasoned arguments - and Doru's point about controlling the syntax is an interesting one that I hadnât thought about.
Personally, I find having too many similar syntaxâs confusing - contributing to things is hard enough - having to remember that its !! Instead of ## and ââ instead of ** is just frustrating for me.
+1 Not only for docs, most platforms like Slack/Discord share the syntax, so now I'm getting "muscle memory" when typing literals using the backtick (`) character, quoting with > or pasting snippets using ```
Sure, maybe we were first with Pillar, but for me, lots of programming is in other languages, and I use Smalltalk where I can, and a hybrid of multiple languages and projects is often the reality - so a lowest common denominator of Markdown is just easier. The fact that we are quite close to what our colleagues in other languages use (regardless of what Python has chosen), is quite interesting.
This helps building "bridges" with other communities. The language as a means of exchange is always the lowest common denominator. As long as it's "efficient enough" then I vote to use what other communities use.
That said, if the community wants to stick to its gunâs thats fine - I will probably still investigate how to use Commonmark for myself, and will still contribute to Pillar docs where I can (and curse history) - but I think we are long better off trying to join emerging standards where we can particularly if they arenât our core language thing. And it just makes it less frictionless for ourselves and newcomers.
The "Not Invented Here" syndrome is strong among Smalltalkers, it's important to be aware of this bias and think more than once whether eating our own dogfood adds value to the core of what Pharo brings. I think we missed some good years fighting with our own SCM and in the end git (or any other file based SCM) prevailed, even when it has limitations. Pareto (80-20) for everything non-core business should be a guide.
Of course, if we were to move, we would need to translate a lot of quality docs to a new format - but I would be up for contributing to that if that was a deciding factor.
There are some Markdown exporters AFAIK, or it could be written. Esteban A. Maringolo