Re: Orgdown: negative feedback & attempt of a root-cause analysis

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Tom Gillespie writes:

> Karl,
>    The exact naming of a thing is nearly always the most contentious
> step in trying to promulgate it. In my own field we can easily get all
> parties to agree on a definition, but they refuse to budge on a name.
> As others have said, I wouldn't worry about kibitizing over the name.
>
> I would however worry about the larger negative reaction. From my
> perspective I think the issue is that there are many efforts working
> toward a formalized specification for Org syntax and Org mode
> functionality, and some of those stakeholders who have invested
> significant effort may feel blindsided by a public declaration
> announcing Orgdown because they were not consulted and not
> made aware that you were working on it.
>
> I appreciate the amount of work that you have put in, I have devoted
> hundreds of hours to working on an alternate implementation of org
> in Racket that uses a formal ebfn in hopes that others will be able
> to use it as a guide and as a way to talk formally about how Org
> parsers and implementations should behave.
>
> It would thus be easy for me to say that your approach has put the
> cart before the horse, because there are countless nuances in the
> specification for Org syntax which must be addressed before any
> levels of org compliance can be specified, otherwise the behavior
> between levels will be inconsistent.
>
> If I were to say this, it would not be fair to you at all. The ideas
> and motivation for Orgdown are vital and important. You have put
> in enormous thought and effort, all because you care about Org
> and want to see it succeed.
>
> The issue is that any shared specification for Org syntax is
> fundamentally about how to coordinate as a community.
> The way that Orgdown was presented to the community feels
> (to me) like it is being imposed top down or coming from an
> individual source, not from an open and visible community
> process (the subject of your original email reads as a declaration
> in english, and thus can be quite off putting, though I know that
> was not the intention).
>
> I personally haven't bothered with promulgation because I think
> that we are not technically ready as a community to approach
> outreach to other developers in a way that we can succeed.
>
> The good news is that all of this can co-exist if we want it to,
> but we need to be clear about our objectives as a community.
>
> To me these objectives are as follows (and I would love
> to hear from others about additional or alternate objectives).
>
> 1. To never fracture Org syntax so as to avoid the nightmare
> of markdown flavors. (This means being able to say clearly
> as a community that a parser is out of compliance and that
> it is up to the user to fix their files. The ruby org parser used
> by Github is a major issue here.)
> 2. To provide a clear specification for what graceful degradation
> looks like when parsing Org syntax if a parser does not support
> some portion of that syntax (e.g. should property drawer lines
> be excluded or rendered as plain text?).
> 3. Provide a solid basis on which further formal specification
> can be built. (My interests in particular are around providing
> consistent semantics for org-babel blocks across languages
> so that babel implementations can clearly communicate what
> runtime features they support.)
>
> The approach for Orgdown can absolutely meet all three of
> these objectives, however in its current form Orgdown1 is not
> sufficiently well specified to avoid fracturing the syntax.
> This is because Org syntax is extremely complex (even the
> elisp implementation of Org mode is internally inconsistent)
> and there are edge cases where behavior will diverge if parsing
> of even the simplest elements is not fully specified.
>
> There are many ways to remedy this, however they require
> a more formal approach. A number of us are working to build
> technical foundations for such a formal approach, but I do not
> think that any of those projects are ready to be used to
> specify discrete levels of Org syntax parsing compliance.
>
> If I may, I would suggest that an Orgdown0 is something that
> could be well specified, but it would avoid parsing of markup
> altogether and only deal with the major element types. Parsing
> paragraphs and all the org objects is not something that can
> be done piecemeal. There are too many interactions between
> different parts of the syntax, and in some cases the existing
> specification desperately needs to be revisited due to the
> complexity that it induces or because it is underspecified.
> Of course this would make Orgdown0 fairly useless as a
> replacement for markdown, but at least it would be a start.

Everything you comment here seems very sensible to me.

Anyway I have to say that, in my case, the name 'orgdown' is not the
issue, but the underlying idea under the naming, whatever the name is.
IMHO, reduce Org to a markup language or, to put it somewhat
metaphorically, distill Org into a workable markup language outside Org
itself and GNU Emacs, is a task that seems impossible to me. Or at least
(for not being so radical), quite difficult. And, on the other hand,
what would be the point of doing that? I think Org and Markdown are the
antipodes, they are like water and oil, although they share certain
purposes. Just to make my current opinion clear.

Best regards,

Juan Manuel