scroll VS Jekyll

It took me many years to get Scroll (https://scroll.pub/) to the point where I love it and am confident it will be the dominant language for writing going forward (replacing markdown).

I first had to invent Tree Notation (2017), which I got wrong on my first two tries (2012's Note and 2013's Space). Then I needed to invent Grammar (2017), and then I made the predecessor to Scroll called Dumbdown (2019). 2 years after that I shipped the first version of Scroll (2021).

Now we are on Scroll version 58 and it's blazing fast, very simple, extremely extendible, and scales very well.

It was 90% me for a while, but recently been very much a team effort.

It took a while to get right because it's a whole new kind of language, so there were a lot of mistakes that I made and had to undo, and it took a while to figure out exactly what was special about it and how to double down on that.

I recently started 2 new newspapers: https://longbeach.pub/ and http://hawaii.pub/. Very different from traditional newspapers in that they are: public domain, open source (view source on every page), and built using a new language (https://scroll.pub/).

Another cool site I found recently (via the replit guy) is https://www.rootclaim.com/

Very cool way to present arguments.

I'm thinking of taking that, as well as argdown, and building some easy to use keywords in scroll https://scroll.pub/

> Context-free grammars, and their associated parsing techniques, don't align well with real-world compilers, and thus we should deemphasise CFGs (Context-Free Grammars) and their associated parsing algorithms.

I think CFG are highly overrated. Top down recursive descent parsers are simple and allow you to craft more human languages. I think building top down parsers is something every dev should do. It's a simple technique with tremendous power.

I think the source code for Scroll (https://github.com/breck7/scroll/tree/main/grammar) demonstrates how liberating moving away from CFGs can be. Easy to extend, compose, build new backends, debug, et cetera. Parser, compiler, and interpreter for each node all in one place. Swap nodes around between languages. Great evolutionary characteristics.

I'll stop there (realizing I need to improve the docs and write a blog post).

- Uses a new language called Scroll: https://scroll.pub/

Also, put down Markdown and give our Scroll a try: https://scroll.pub

It now powers sites like my own blog (https://breckyunits.com/), knowledge bases like PLDB.com, and our first new public domain daily newspaper called the Long Beach Pub (https://longbeach.pub/1-3-2023.html).

> Java, Go, Javascript, Rust, etc are all regularly written with whitespace, and have tools to enforce such formatting, but they don't derive information from it.

Ah you reminded me. A curious phenomenon I've observed with Prettier in JS and fmt in Go is languages are moving to standardized whitespace, but as you said, not yet deriving information from it. I don't know enough about Java or Rust but I suspect they probably both have adopted a Prettier/fmt like convention where all code is formatted on save. So it seems like we are moving to a world where it will be a simple flip of a switch to then start having popular languages extract meaning from the whitespace.

> Also, Python has existed for decades and still there is little further adoption of indentation-sensitivity. It doesn't seem like a wave of indentation-sensitive languages will be coming any time soon.

I think it's coming big time this year. I think our Scroll (https://scroll.pub/) will catch fire and be the go to language instead of Markdown by the end of the year. Then with the increasing success of TreeBase (powering PLDB and others) we will start to see JSON fall for config formats and document storage databases. A lot more will happen to, data vis will be a big one, but those 2 I'm reasonably certain of happening in 2023.

GoAccess: https://goaccess.io/. I don't miss Google Analytics at all.

Loom. It's not open source I don't think but I'm digging it and excited when a public domain competitor comes out.

Our https://scroll.pub/. It's far beyond markdown at this point. I am able to not only write better but also maintain thousands of pages of content by hand (well, most of the credit for that belongs to Apple M1s, Sublime Text, git, MacOS, and Github). The stuff we are doing with it now would just not be possible with anything else, and what we're coming out with next year is super exciting. It's all public domain.

This blog is running on Hugo. It had previously been running on Jekyll. Both these SSGs ship with the ability to create excerpts from your markdown content in 1 line or thereabouts.

Jekyll

In future, if you want to move from Jekyll to something else, you just have to worry about that `_posts` and `_assets` folder. They may have different naming convention but you can just config-managed it or change it to your choice. This is why I suggested owning that two yourself.

You also may not worry about FrontMatter[3] (meta in the header) and its accompanying jazz by asking Jekyll to use the plugins `jekyll-optional-front-matter` and `jekyll-titles-from-headings`. These comes as part of the officially supported Jekyll plugins[4] by Github. That way, you are just writing a human-readable plain-text spiced up with Markdown and readable by almost every other Static Site Generator.

Now, play with the `_config.yml` that Jekyll generates for you from the theme above to define your post dates, navigation, and others. Jekyll is one of the OGs — the Gandalf of Static Site Generators. If you have a problem, someone somewhere has solved that.

Did I missed something? I was supposed to write a blog article for my website on this one and this comment will serve as my starting bullet points.

1. https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...

2. https://jekyllrb.com

3. https://frontmatter.codes/docs/markdown

4. https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...

"Using the Chirpy theme for Jekyll."

I would suggest looking into static site generators. Some popular examples, which are used myself are: - Hugo: https://gohugo.io/ - Jekyll: https://jekyllrb.com

In terms of GitHub stars, SSGs like Next.js, Hugo, Gatsby, Docusaurus, Nuxt.js, and Jekyll top the list. Some popular SSGs even host conferences and workshops, providing resources and networking opportunities for those looking to explore more advanced topics in depth.

I created my blog using Jekyll, a great open-source tool that can transform your markdown content into a simple, old-fashioned-but-trendy, static site. What are the advantages of this approach? The site is super-light, super-fast, super-secure and SEO-friendly. Of course, it’s not always the best solution, but for some use cases, like a simple personal blog, it’s really a good option.

Yes, it's Markdown and I use https://jekyllrb.com with the theme "jekyll-theme-hacker" to generate the site. I quite like how simple it is.