Change my mind.
I write plain text. I just happen to format it like markdown.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
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Markdown...is...plaintext, though?
Every programming language is plain text.
Not intended to be easily human-readable though.
Sure they are. They're intended to be as easy to read for a human as possible.
No. The primary purpose of programming languages is to be machine-readable first, human-readable second. The primary purpose of both markdown and plaintext is to be equally readable by both humans and machines.
Assembly, perhaps. But not every other language. Every other language's sole purpose is to be easier than assembly to read by humans, so it can be compiled or translated through an engine into something a machine can read.
Machines do not read Rust. Machines do not read C++. Machines do not read JavaScript. Humans do.
Machines do read Rust. Just because those machines are compiling the Rust code doesn't mean they aren't reading it. And every affordance the Rust devs included to make it easier for that compiler to do its job makes it harder for humans to read, but Markdown's affordances are equally helpful for humans as for computers; and they're designed to be so because they were adapted from shorthand that was already in use.
Debate all you want, but the literal first sentence on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language
A programming language is an engineered language for expressing computer programs,[1] typically allowing software to be written in a human readable manner.
yup but with more tricks
Markdown is text that can kick flip
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Markdown would be better if everyone using it used the same markdown. I swear no two places use it the same.
We could have had that, but when some people who might have succeeded tried to establish a proper standard for Markdown in 2014 the original inventor threw a tantrum so they backed down and it never went anywhere.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/
This upsets me.
true though
LaTeX has entered the chat
kick him out.
Sorry, he already embed into all scientific paper.
you will change you mind yourself when your - key breaks from all the
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HEADINGS
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I wouldn't dare try to understand the mind that thinks that Markdown is at all like html. 🤷♂️
I mean, Markdown was specifically designed to be convertable to HTML. So, it is structurally rather similar. It's basically just a bunch of aliases for a subset of HTML tags.
Having said that, it is also designed to be plain text. You don't have to convert it, and even when you do convert it, there's a good chance that what you've written in plain text will look fine in converted Markdown as well.
For the purposes of this meme, I would certainly group it with plain text.
Isn't markdown a strict superset of html though? As in any valid html is valid markdown. Not usually how it is used though and im not sure about how most markdown flavours handle it, but it is a "convenient" escape hatch
They are both at the end of the day UTF-8 text.
Behold the holy Grail of text structuring and formatting (as long as you don't want to deal with LaTeX): orgmode
Typst, Perchance
I need to get into Typst. Been hearing about it a lot for a good while.
I checked Typst out a bit. It couldn't do a specific, niche thing I want to do but in general it felt really nice. Definitely feels newer than LaTeX and with less technical debt/baggage. A bit more limited but still nice
And for some reason it seems there's no community for Typst on Threadiverse
Thank you for sharing! I haven't even looked at it yet — I imagine it's like a supercharged Markdown, with ways to interlink documents and that kind of jazz? Am I way off?
I'd rather say it's a cross between the two. Because most of the text is written like MD but then it does have document settings and tables look like in LaTeX
Looks beautiful, wow. Very simple. I so wish I had this through my uni days. LaTeX was pretty powerful but it was pretty painful sometimes as well.
The orgmode site doesn't display properly on my phone. I can't even scroll horizontally to read the text. 😂
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A quality text file is a bit of a lost art these days. I like looking through this archive of old text files from the 80s and 90s once in a while. http://textfiles.com/directory.html
Graphite pencil and paper is God
pointy stick and dirt clearing or gtfo
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(Trivia: the Assembly code I made for the last panel does work)
They're almost the same thing, so this kinda' hits like two people arguing over which shitbox $300 car they drive is faster...
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Ngl plain txt is the best . But not for writing blog . Need something like # for headings and stuff . To make my blog portable i don't use mardow much just # for heading and # for tag
Markdown is so annoying. I wanted to record a command in Joplin and had the audacity to make it bold to highlight something. Pasted it into their terminal and it put a bunch of asterisks in. Thanks.
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