The other major feature is anyone can learn it in 5 minutes and fit all the instructions on an index card.
Many years ago I introduced it at a newspaper full of OG reporters who were a little nostalgic for the clatter of typewriters and the kid who would run the drafts around the newsroom.
On the first day they thought it was weird. On the second—and I'm not exaggerating, it was 24 hours—they loved it, because unlike MS Word/most WYSIWYG junkers, it did exactly what they told it to, without fussy formatting or invisible characters.
I've done this several times since, with all kinds of non-technical users who would never, ever tolerate something like LaTeX.
The whole point is to dumb a problem down so that people can focus on substance instead of form. It’s typesetting for people who aren’t technical and to lower the barrier for technical people for documentation of what they’re working on so far that you can ridicule people who still refuse to document their shit.
Any time you can make a developer chose between belligerence or stupidity to explain their behavior, they will either change the behavior or go with belligerence because they’d rather be dead than thought stupid. In either case you have maneuvered them out of being able to continue to be obstructive to team dynamics.
So you “solve” social problems with technical solutions not by making the solution better, but by making it the dumbest thing ever so only an idiot wouldn’t understand it.
It’s called markdown because it contains simple markup. Some of that is structural, no argument, but it’s also layout. Just enough to keep readers on board with what you’re saying.
Many years ago I introduced it at a newspaper full of OG reporters who were a little nostalgic for the clatter of typewriters and the kid who would run the drafts around the newsroom.
On the first day they thought it was weird. On the second—and I'm not exaggerating, it was 24 hours—they loved it, because unlike MS Word/most WYSIWYG junkers, it did exactly what they told it to, without fussy formatting or invisible characters.
I've done this several times since, with all kinds of non-technical users who would never, ever tolerate something like LaTeX.