Zato VS scroll

Yes, the article is correct, there is a market for Markdown sites and related products.

Our Zato website is in Markdown: https://zato.io

We have a purpose-built static site generator, which makes sense in our case because:

* The resulting site is very fast, seeing as there is no need for runtime generation of any assets / HTML / any kind of resources

* It is easier for developers to work on documentation because they already know Markdown

* It is easy to statically apply filters such as spell checkers for multiple languages during the build

* Various optimizations can be applied, e.g. incremental builds or on-demand builds

The drawbacks are:

* Non-technical translators may have a difficult time working with anything but either their own specialized tools or MS Word and they consider Markdown to be "advanced"

* Sometimes you work with writers who are not technical at all and who will not understand what a build system is even if they are open to the idea of learning Markdown itself

Thus, there is a market for a lightweight CMS that would enable non-technical people to author Markdown in their browsers, without a need for any command line usage.

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.