Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Mark Bainter <mbainter-smgl AT trampledstones.com>]

Remko van der Vossen [wich AT stack.nl] wrote:
> Uhmn, why? We oblige devs to write sorcery and spells in bash. Not zsh,
> not ksh, not tcsh, not C, not C++, not Perl, not Pythen, not whatever,
> but bash. 

This is a valid point.  However, I imagine one reason for choosing bash
is that it is something the largest number of people already know.  Some
people (like me) prefer other flavors personally, but we all learn Bash.
It opens us up to the largest number of possible contributors.

The same motivation needs to be in play here.  Personally, I think LaTeX
is the greatest thing since sliced bread.  Knowing LaTeX just makes me
even more angry every time I'm forced to use Word.  But LaTeX is just
not something most people know. (Even in our target market).  However,
most everyone knows at least a little bit about wiki syntax, and picking
it up is fairly straightforward.  Granted, moinmoin isn't exactly the
best example of that, but it's still easier for the uninitiated to
pickup than LaTeX.  

As I noted in another post, not just because of the syntax - which
you're right isn't all that hard once you put in a minimum amount of
effort.  It's also about the build environment, figuring out what is
legal where, figuring out the sometimes obscure error messages, etc.
With wiki it's just a few short steps to make a change - with LaTeX it's
just a lot more involved by comparison.

We want people to contribute to the documentation, and NOBODY likes to
do that.  We *like* to write code.  So having a slightly higher bar
there isn't insurmountable.  But for docs we need to make it as
straightforward as possible.

(Which, is also why we want to have a git interface for the wiki
backend.  Some of us prefer to clone/edit/commit than clicky-clicky)
;-)

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