Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung <christian.kolen-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

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It’s interesting to hear opinion and/or philosophy from another 
perspective. And I think in general I agree with you.

Just to make sure I didn’t make clear of what I want to say: (replaces 
students by “most/many students” below to avoid over-generalization)

   1. 
   
   the GUI problem of pandoc, if being dealt with in the future, probably 
   should not be under jgm/pandoc, nor have the name of pandoc (but something 
   close). (pandoc as a language vs. pandoc as the library vs. pandoc as a cli 
   vs. pandoc as a gui (might actually work though?)) Probably won’t be by jgm 
   himself either. So I’m not talking about pandoc-gui as the should-be future 
   direction of jgm/pandoc.
   2. 
   
   there’s already one interesting tool — https://typora.io — that’s almost 
   pandoc-gui. My main problem with this is, its markdown syntax is not 
   strictly pandoc markdown, but a markdown defines by the author of the app, 
   and based on the same pandoc AST, such that any input/output formats of 
   pandoc can be supported. Some of other issues I concern are not 
   open-source, and not multi-platform. But these are minor and if someone 
   write a great, proprietary GUI for pandoc, I think if he asks for money, he 
   deserves it. (regarding licensing, GUI like this do not include pandoc, so 
   the markdown to AST conversion, as well as AST to HTML/etc. conversion are 
   proprietary code, and pandoc’s executables are optional, user-installed 
   add-on.)
   3. 
   
   more on education, I agree students should learn. But the current 
   education system do not provide opportunities to learn something like this. 
   It’s not pandoc specific but in general: ever seeing a University course 
   teaching students to use MS Word? I might be wrong, but they just assumes 
   you do. (when I was in Hong Kong, A-level (high school exam) education, the 
   curriculum includes those. But I didn’t see a University class on this.) A 
   better example is LaTeX, there are no University class (I’m pretty sure at 
   least for the institutes I’ve been to) teaching LaTeX, yet they expect you 
   (at least graduate students) to pick it up on your own. Things like this 
   are deemed unimportant as far as University course goes, but in a sense is 
   the most important skills one need (since it is portable to any given 
   tasks/courses/jobs/etc.).
   1. 
      
      A corollary to this point is, students have no time to learn these 
      tools. Especially in US, many of my students are working part-time to 
      support themselves. Assignments are a ton many (US education system 
      emphasize on continuous assessment. A consequence of this is students often 
      have not much disciplines… Because they often do what they are told to but 
      not planning it on their own. It’s a snowball effect.)
      2. 
      
      I guess one thing makes markdown so popular is, the learning curve is 
      very gentle, and it almost takes no time to pick the syntax up. I don’t 
      know a lot about the histories of markdown, but I think part of the 
      contribution of the widespread of markdown is actually iPad — the first 
      time a full-(screen-)size “computer” cannot uses Word. A lot of GUI has 
      been built (e.g. Byword) and distribute in the Appstore that uses the 
      markdown syntax. This is the “laymenization” of markdown (I just make it 
      up, not a historian/social scientist/etc.), previously designed to ease the 
      job of “coders” of HTML.
      3. 
      
      So the problem (that prevent “laymenization”) about pandoc is there’s 
      no good GUI for people to gets their hands on it the first time. At least 
      for me, pandoc is not the first markdown dialect I learnt, and my guess is 
      the majority of pandoc users are similar this way. (Atom doesn’t count, 
      although I plan to write a guide of using pandoc “GUI” using Atom, because 
      Atom is for hackers, and setting up Atom to use pandoc is non-trivial at 
      least for Mac users because of PATH)
      
Ya, so to reiterate what I said, I am not saying the pandoc “core” has any 
problem. I am talking more about a possible 3rd party effort to build a 
pandoc GUI to attract the “next billion”. I personally love the tool pandoc 
very much, and I wish to see everyone on the planet using it, not just an 
“elite class of people”. It also ensures the longevity of pandoc (although 
the heavy integration in Rmarkdown and iPython seems to provide a lot of 
stability to pandoc’s future). Because of this, this post might fit in the 
“ecosystem” thread better. (we’re here because of a digression on how 
difficult to lure people in using pandoc and collaborate with us.)

P.S. I think there’s a big philosophical difference among the pandoc users 
on why they love pandoc. To some, markdown is a plaintext format, readable 
in source, and pandoc is an extension to it. To me, the niceness of the 
pandoc syntax is more like Python syntax: although it reads nice (i.e. very 
easy to maintain), I’m sure I’m going to “run” it rather than read it. i.e. 
markdown to me is always just a source code. The real attractiveness of 
pandoc to me is 1 source, multiple outputs (covering most formats I need + 
I will need). This point cannot be emphasized enough: it gives a stability 
to my documents no matter what I will do with it in the future, which 
cannot be said even for MS Word. I guess the reason of the success of 
pandoc is its richness — it gives us many reasons to love it, and it only 
takes one for us to fall in love with it.
​

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