including Pillar in Pharo image by default

Thank Tim,

My primary reason to submit the message was not to necessarily persuade you per se. But to provide something historical for the mailing list as this can be a recurring subject. Why use Pillar markup instead of ???(insert personal favorite).

If Pharo were to decide on a different markup language. The question would still be which one, why and then how do we proceed. Then our extensions may not be accepted by the greater body of users of said markup. We would still be contributing to the fragmentation of markup. As far as familiarity, I don't know. And familiarity with what. I do not find that reStructuredText to be similar to Markdown.

It would stop people from asking why we aren't using Markdown. But it wouldn't prevent others. Why aren't we using GFM Markdown, or Kramdown or Commonmark or ...? Why aren't we using YAML or reST or AsciiDoc or insert latest greatest creation markup or current flavor of the moment. Which is why I wanted to point out that there is no consensus among users of markup languages. At least I do not see one. Nor do I believe that we have seen the end of creation of new markup languages.

I understand the difficulty, though I do not suffer from it as I have not mastered any of those other languages. I have been using Squeak/Pharo for a long time. I struggle when I look at those other languages. To me they are the foreign ones.

And I do not see these emerging standards you refer to. When we see Python, Ruby, Perl, C++, various projects, etc. communities having consensus on a common markup for documentation. Then I see an emerging standard. Until then it seems to possibly be an emerging standard for a particular markup language which is among the set of markup languages.

If we were the only language and development environment doing our own thing. Then we might have a very good reason to talk. But we are not. Python with its enormous community does its own thing. I don't know that other languages have a consensus for markup for documentation except for Python and Pharo.

While writing this email I went and discovered that even GitHub is not dogmatic about the subject. Obviously they have an opinion. But they permit multiple markup languages. Quite possibly someone could write a Pillar tool for GitHub to use and then we could just submit Readme.pillar for our projects. :)

https://github.com/github/markup

Shows that GitHub allows for .markdown, .mdown, .mkdn, .md; .textile; .rdoc; .org; .creole; .mediawiki, .wiki; .rst; .asciidoc, .adoc, .asc; .pod.  So it seems that there are many communities on GitHub who prefer their own markup and tools.

We could possibly write the Pillar tool for GitHub or an exporter to the preferred markup language of the above.

This author provides arguments for using reStructuredText over Markdown for GitHub documents. Citing deficiencies in Markdown and expressiveness in reST.

https://gist.github.com/dupuy/1855764

Jimmie et al. nicely reasoned arguments - and Doru's point about controlling the syntax is an interesting one that I hadn’t thought about.

Personally, I find having too many similar syntax’s confusing - contributing to things is hard enough - having to remember that its !! Instead of ## and “” instead of ** is just frustrating for me.

My vote would be what Peter suggested - use http://spec.commonmark.org/0.28/ and put our Pillar extensions back on top for things that Stef was mentioning. (I think that’s what I’ve understood gfm markdown is).

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. 

That said, if the community wants to stick to its gun’s 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 aren’t our core language thing. And it just makes it less frictionless for ourselves and newcomers.

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.

Tim

On 14 Aug 2017, at 16:41, Jimmie Houchin <[hidden email]> wrote:

TL;DR

Main points:
Their is no universally accepted markup language.
Other communities use their own markup and  tools and their markup and tools choice is not determine by other communities decisions.
We need a language and tool chain that we can control and maintain which accomplishes our goals.
Our language and tools already exist and have existed for longer than most of the other markup languages. Of course they existed in various different forms over the years and have evolved into what they currently are.
It might be nice to have a GFM Markdown exporter from Pillar for GitHub projects.


I just want to comment on the fact that there is no universal markup language that every development community has settled upon. Making Markdown or some variant the markup language for Pharo only aligns us with a certain part of the development community. Even Markdown is not unified as is evident by the discussion.

It is true that GitHub uses their variant of Markdown. And as long as we use GitHub we will need to use their variant for documents that reside on their system.

However as a significant counter example to lets all use gfm Markdown, is the Python community and their documentation.

https://docs.python.org/devguide/documenting.html
"""
7. Documenting Python
The Python language has a substantial body of documentation, much of it contributed by various authors. The markup used for the Python documentation is reStructuredText, developed by the docutils project, amended by custom directives and using a toolset named Sphinx to post-process the HTML output.

This document describes the style guide for our documentation as well as the custom reStructuredText markup introduced by Sphinx to support Python documentation and how it should be used.

The documentation in HTML, PDF or EPUB format is generated from text files written using the reStructuredText format and contained in the CPython Git repository.
"""

So the Python community uses their own markup language and their own tool chain. So therefore, it is not wrong for a community to go their own way, for their own reasons. Even within the conventional file based languages such as Python.

The fact that you have tools such as Pandoc, suggest that there is not true uniformity or unanimity among developers as to the best markup language or tool chain.

I believe that a language that we can control and maintain is better than adopting some other foreign markup language that is neither better, nor unanimously used by all. That would ultimately potentially require extensions to accomplish our goals. Then we would be maintaining someone else's language with our extensions that may or may not be accepted by the larger community. This does not prevent but rather encourages fragmentation of the existing Markdown.

Regardless, Pillar markup already exists. The tools in Pharo already understand it. Should someone desire to use Pharo which is far more different from Python/Ruby/etc. than Pillar syntax is from Markdown. Then it should be worth their effort to learn our tools.

Pillar markup is older than Markdown, etc. It's history begins in SmallWiki. It isn't as if we jumped up and decided to create something new in order to be different. Our markup and tools are older. They (and others) are the ones that decided to do their own markup and tools. And it is okay that they did so. Nothing wrong with doing so. Every community has the right to what they believe is best for their community. Even if other communities disagree.

The ability to control and maintain is highly valuable. We can understand what our requirements are for today. But we can not know what the requirements are in the future. Nor can we know that Markdown or whomever will have such requirements when they appear. It is easy to see in the beginning with the Squeak Wiki syntax to the now Pillar syntax, changes that have been made to accommodate new requirements as they became known. We need to maintain that ability. Sure we would reserve the right to do so in any language we adopt. But the then current standard bearer of said language would determine whether what we do is acceptable and incorporate or whether we are then in fact adding to their fragmentation. Pillar is ours. There is not fragmentation when we evolve.

However, since we have made a decision to use GitHub and GitHub has made a decision to use their own GFM Markdown. It might be nice to have a GFM Markdown exporter from Pillar for GitHub projects. This way we can use our own tools and markup language to accomplish whatever we want to accomplish. Including generating a Readme.md for our GitHub projects.

Just wanted to toss out this simple opinion and facts about the situation.

Jimmie


On 08/14/2017 04:10 AM, Tudor Girba wrote:

Hi Tim,

The main benefit of relying on Pillar is that we control its syntax and can easily extend it for our purposes. Also, there was quite a bit of engineering invested in it, and even though we still need to improve it, there exists a pipeline that allows people to quickly publish books.

The figure embedding problem is one example of the need to customize the syntax and behavior, but this extensibility will become even more important for supporting the idea of moving the documentation inside the image. For example, the ability to refer to a class, method or other artifacts will be quite relevant soon especially that the editor will be able to embed advanced elements inside the text.

Cheers,
Doru

On Aug 14, 2017, at 10:46 AM, Tim Mackinnon [hidden email] wrote:

Hi Stef - I think your’s is a fair requirement (in fact I hit something similar when doing a static website using a JS markdown framework - and this is why I mentioned Kramdown which adds a few extras to regular markdown - but it feels like it goes a bit too far).

My next item on my learning todo list was to try and replace that JS generator with something from Smalltalk - so I think we can possibly come up with something that ticks all the right boxes (I’d like to try anyway).

I’ll keep working away on it and compare notes with you. I think with Pillar, it was more that things like headers, bold and italics are similar concepts but just use different characters - so I keep typing the wrong thing and getting frustrated particularly when we embrace Git and readme.md is in markdown.


Tim

On 13 Aug 2017, at 20:08, Stephane Ducasse [hidden email] wrote:

Hi tim

I personally do not care much about the syntax but I care about what I
can do with it
(ref, cite, ... )
I cannot write books in markdown because reference to figures!!!!!!
were missing.

And of course a parser because markdown is not really nice to parse
and I will not write a parser because I have something else to do. I
want to make pillar smaller, simpler, nicer.

Now if someone come up with a parser that parse for REAL a markdown
that can be extended with decent behavior (figure reference, section
reference, cite) and can be extended because there are many things
that can be nice to have (for example I want to be able to write the
example below) and emit a PillarModel (AST) we can talk to have
another syntax for Pillar but not before.

[[[test
2+3

5

]]]

and being able to verify that the doc is in sync.


Stef



On Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 12:37 AM, Tim Mackinnon [hidden email] wrote:

Of course, I/we recognise and appreciate all the work that's gone into docs in pillar - but I think it should be reasonably straightforward to write a converter as it is pretty closely related from what I have seen.

So I don't make the suggestion flippantly, and would want to help write a converter and get us to a common ground where we can differentiate on the aspects where we can excel.

Tim

Sent from my iPhone

On 11 Aug 2017, at 23:21, Peter Uhnak [hidden email] wrote:

A long time issue with Markdown was that there was no standardization (and when I used Pillar's MD export ~2 years ago it didn't work well).

However CommonMark ( http://spec.commonmark.org/0.28/ ) has become the de-facto standard, so it would make sense to support it bidirectionally with Pillar.

The readme.md that Peter is talking about is gfm markdown

Well, technically it is just a CommonMark, as I am not using any github extensions.
(Github uses CommonMarks and adds just couple small extensions.)

Peter

--
www.tudorgirba.com
www.feenk.com

“Live like you mean it."

Hi,

While I appreciate the historical perspective, I continue to be with Tim on this (and I consider myself part of the Pharo Community). I have also personal preferences for other light markup languages (like txt2tags[1] and dokuwiki's[2]), but I will stick with Pandoc's Markdown, because is support everything Stephan or any professional author wants to do and in fact you can create full books with it, including references, tables, images, and bibliographic references (which are not supported by Pillar AFAIK), but also because is an emerging standard beyond the programmers community, including academicians and researchers with the Scholarly Markdown[3] initiative and with possibilities to import and export from/to several markup languages[4].

Thank Tim,

My primary reason to submit the message was not to necessarily persuade you per se. But to provide something historical for the mailing list as this can be a recurring subject. Why use Pillar markup instead of ???(insert personal favorite).

If Pharo were to decide on a different markup language. The question would still be which one, why and then how do we proceed. Then our extensions may not be accepted by the greater body of users of said markup. We would still be contributing to the fragmentation of markup. As far as familiarity, I don't know. And familiarity with what. I do not find that reStructuredText to be similar to Markdown.

It would stop people from asking why we aren't using Markdown. But it wouldn't prevent others. Why aren't we using GFM Markdown, or Kramdown or Commonmark or ...? Why aren't we using YAML or reST or AsciiDoc or insert latest greatest creation markup or current flavor of the moment. Which is why I wanted to point out that there is no consensus among users of markup languages. At least I do not see one. Nor do I believe that we have seen the end of creation of new markup languages.

I understand the difficulty, though I do not suffer from it as I have not mastered any of those other languages. I have been using Squeak/Pharo for a long time. I struggle when I look at those other languages. To me they are the foreign ones.

And I do not see these emerging standards you refer to. When we see Python, Ruby, Perl, C++, various projects, etc. communities having consensus on a common markup for documentation. Then I see an emerging standard. Until then it seems to possibly be an emerging standard for a particular markup language which is among the set of markup languages.

If we were the only language and development environment doing our own thing. Then we might have a very good reason to talk. But we are not. Python with its enormous community does its own thing. I don't know that other languages have a consensus for markup for documentation except for Python and Pharo.

While writing this email I went and discovered that even GitHub is not dogmatic about the subject. Obviously they have an opinion. But they permit multiple markup languages. Quite possibly someone could write a Pillar tool for GitHub to use and then we could just submit Readme.pillar for our projects. :)

https://github.com/github/markup

Shows that GitHub allows for .markdown, .mdown, .mkdn, .md; .textile; .rdoc; .org; .creole; .mediawiki, .wiki; .rst; .asciidoc, .adoc, .asc; .pod.  So it seems that there are many communities on GitHub who prefer their own markup and tools.

We could possibly write the Pillar tool for GitHub or an exporter to the preferred markup language of the above.

This author provides arguments for using reStructuredText over Markdown for GitHub documents. Citing deficiencies in Markdown and expressiveness in reST.

https://gist.github.com/dupuy/1855764

So again. I am just not seeing a consensus around any emerging standard for "the markup language".

At the same time if you are desirous of writing in Commonmark in your text editor. Can you not write conversion software that goes from Commonmark to Pillar? Thus, meeting want you want and what we require? If you were to do so, you would definitely have a good understanding of the differences in philosophy and capabilities of each. Just a thought.

Any way, thanks for engaging in the conversation. I wasn't targeting you personally, but rather the topic. You are not alone in your thinking. The Pharo community is not alone in its thinking either.

Thanks.

Jimmie

On 08/14/2017 11:34 AM, Tim Mackinnon wrote:

Jimmie et al. nicely reasoned arguments - and Doru's point about controlling the syntax is an interesting one that I hadn’t thought about.

Personally, I find having too many similar syntax’s confusing - contributing to things is hard enough - having to remember that its !! Instead of ## and “” instead of ** is just frustrating for me.

My vote would be what Peter suggested - use http://spec.commonmark.org/0.28/ and put our Pillar extensions back on top for things that Stef was mentioning. (I think that’s what I’ve understood gfm markdown is).

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. 

That said, if the community wants to stick to its gun’s 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 aren’t our core language thing. And it just makes it less frictionless for ourselves and newcomers.

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.

Tim

On 14 Aug 2017, at 16:41, Jimmie Houchin <[hidden email]> wrote:

TL;DR

Main points:
Their is no universally accepted markup language.
Other communities use their own markup and  tools and their markup and tools choice is not determine by other communities decisions.
We need a language and tool chain that we can control and maintain which accomplishes our goals.
Our language and tools already exist and have existed for longer than most of the other markup languages. Of course they existed in various different forms over the years and have evolved into what they currently are.
It might be nice to have a GFM Markdown exporter from Pillar for GitHub projects.


I just want to comment on the fact that there is no universal markup language that every development community has settled upon. Making Markdown or some variant the markup language for Pharo only aligns us with a certain part of the development community. Even Markdown is not unified as is evident by the discussion.

It is true that GitHub uses their variant of Markdown. And as long as we use GitHub we will need to use their variant for documents that reside on their system.

However as a significant counter example to lets all use gfm Markdown, is the Python community and their documentation.

https://docs.python.org/devguide/documenting.html
"""
7. Documenting Python
The Python language has a substantial body of documentation, much of it contributed by various authors. The markup used for the Python documentation is reStructuredText, developed by the docutils project, amended by custom directives and using a toolset named Sphinx to post-process the HTML output.

This document describes the style guide for our documentation as well as the custom reStructuredText markup introduced by Sphinx to support Python documentation and how it should be used.

The documentation in HTML, PDF or EPUB format is generated from text files written using the reStructuredText format and contained in the CPython Git repository.
"""

So the Python community uses their own markup language and their own tool chain. So therefore, it is not wrong for a community to go their own way, for their own reasons. Even within the conventional file based languages such as Python.

The fact that you have tools such as Pandoc, suggest that there is not true uniformity or unanimity among developers as to the best markup language or tool chain.

I believe that a language that we can control and maintain is better than adopting some other foreign markup language that is neither better, nor unanimously used by all. That would ultimately potentially require extensions to accomplish our goals. Then we would be maintaining someone else's language with our extensions that may or may not be accepted by the larger community. This does not prevent but rather encourages fragmentation of the existing Markdown.

Regardless, Pillar markup already exists. The tools in Pharo already understand it. Should someone desire to use Pharo which is far more different from Python/Ruby/etc. than Pillar syntax is from Markdown. Then it should be worth their effort to learn our tools.

Pillar markup is older than Markdown, etc. It's history begins in SmallWiki. It isn't as if we jumped up and decided to create something new in order to be different. Our markup and tools are older. They (and others) are the ones that decided to do their own markup and tools. And it is okay that they did so. Nothing wrong with doing so. Every community has the right to what they believe is best for their community. Even if other communities disagree.

The ability to control and maintain is highly valuable. We can understand what our requirements are for today. But we can not know what the requirements are in the future. Nor can we know that Markdown or whomever will have such requirements when they appear. It is easy to see in the beginning with the Squeak Wiki syntax to the now Pillar syntax, changes that have been made to accommodate new requirements as they became known. We need to maintain that ability. Sure we would reserve the right to do so in any language we adopt. But the then current standard bearer of said language would determine whether what we do is acceptable and incorporate or whether we are then in fact adding to their fragmentation. Pillar is ours. There is not fragmentation when we evolve.

However, since we have made a decision to use GitHub and GitHub has made a decision to use their own GFM Markdown. It might be nice to have a GFM Markdown exporter from Pillar for GitHub projects. This way we can use our own tools and markup language to accomplish whatever we want to accomplish. Including generating a Readme.md for our GitHub projects.

Just wanted to toss out this simple opinion and facts about the situation.

Jimmie


On 08/14/2017 04:10 AM, Tudor Girba wrote:

Hi Tim,

The main benefit of relying on Pillar is that we control its syntax and can easily extend it for our purposes. Also, there was quite a bit of engineering invested in it, and even though we still need to improve it, there exists a pipeline that allows people to quickly publish books.

The figure embedding problem is one example of the need to customize the syntax and behavior, but this extensibility will become even more important for supporting the idea of moving the documentation inside the image. For example, the ability to refer to a class, method or other artifacts will be quite relevant soon especially that the editor will be able to embed advanced elements inside the text.

Cheers,
Doru

On Aug 14, 2017, at 10:46 AM, Tim Mackinnon [hidden email] wrote:

Hi Stef - I think your’s is a fair requirement (in fact I hit something similar when doing a static website using a JS markdown framework - and this is why I mentioned Kramdown which adds a few extras to regular markdown - but it feels like it goes a bit too far).

My next item on my learning todo list was to try and replace that JS generator with something from Smalltalk - so I think we can possibly come up with something that ticks all the right boxes (I’d like to try anyway).

I’ll keep working away on it and compare notes with you. I think with Pillar, it was more that things like headers, bold and italics are similar concepts but just use different characters - so I keep typing the wrong thing and getting frustrated particularly when we embrace Git and readme.md is in markdown.


Tim

On 13 Aug 2017, at 20:08, Stephane Ducasse [hidden email] wrote:

Hi tim

I personally do not care much about the syntax but I care about what I
can do with it
(ref, cite, ... )
I cannot write books in markdown because reference to figures!!!!!!
were missing.

And of course a parser because markdown is not really nice to parse
and I will not write a parser because I have something else to do. I
want to make pillar smaller, simpler, nicer.

Now if someone come up with a parser that parse for REAL a markdown
that can be extended with decent behavior (figure reference, section
reference, cite) and can be extended because there are many things
that can be nice to have (for example I want to be able to write the
example below) and emit a PillarModel (AST) we can talk to have
another syntax for Pillar but not before.

[[[test
2+3

5

]]]

and being able to verify that the doc is in sync.


Stef



On Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 12:37 AM, Tim Mackinnon [hidden email] wrote:

Of course, I/we recognise and appreciate all the work that's gone into docs in pillar - but I think it should be reasonably straightforward to write a converter as it is pretty closely related from what I have seen.

So I don't make the suggestion flippantly, and would want to help write a converter and get us to a common ground where we can differentiate on the aspects where we can excel.

Tim

Sent from my iPhone

On 11 Aug 2017, at 23:21, Peter Uhnak [hidden email] wrote:

A long time issue with Markdown was that there was no standardization (and when I used Pillar's MD export ~2 years ago it didn't work well).

However CommonMark ( http://spec.commonmark.org/0.28/ ) has become the de-facto standard, so it would make sense to support it bidirectionally with Pillar.

The readme.md that Peter is talking about is gfm markdown

Well, technically it is just a CommonMark, as I am not using any github extensions.
(Github uses CommonMarks and adds just couple small extensions.)

Peter

--
www.tudorgirba.com
www.feenk.com

“Live like you mean it."