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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this is that if you want to make any changes to the plain text you have to edit the markup in unison if you want the result to look coherent. So this gives up one of the principal benefits of markup languages: you can edit them with a simple text editor in a straightforward manner.

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To be fair the author acknowledges this. To make an analogy, this seems to me more like the equivalent of ASM than the equivalent of C, the only reasonable way to make this work is to have a high-level language that "compiles down" to Hope.

Sure, but now you've come full-circle: what is that high-level language going to look like, if not a traditional markup language? And if Hope is intended to be object code rather than source code, what's the point of making it a text format at all?

If I have to be honest I don't see much from this either, but a potential upside is structural separation of text and presentation in a way that's different from HTML/CSS, in this case the content would be pure ASCII text as opposed to a tree structure/object model.

I'm not sure I agree with this premise either, the hierarchical structure seems inherently semantical to me, but the argument of the OP is it isn't the case.

> what's the point of making it a text format at all?

The text part is ASCII, so it make sense to represent it as such. The "presentation" part could be binary.

The only reason I used a text format is because I wanted to keep the code as simple as possible. Only introducing extra complexity when I hit a wall somewhere. I don't know if the current format will scale to more complex use cases, but I really like the fact that you can read HTML and reason about it, so I kept to that in Hope as well.

As for the text part, that is simple. I like to be able to manipulate text as text. There are many many tools to work with plain text. I can use regular expressions to search through text, get ranges of the result and apply an annotation to those ranges. You lose a lot of that in any other format.

> one of the principal benefits of markup languages: you can edit them with a simple text editor in a straightforward manner.

That wouldn't be much of a benefit for me because I don't use Nano. I don't think many people do either.

I can't put my finger on what alternative you're alluding to here. Writing HTML/Markdown/whatever feels mostly the same whether I'm doing it in Nano or Notepad or VSCode, and I probably use all three of those on a daily basis depending on what I'm editing/how long/what privileges I need.

> Writing HTML/Markdown/whatever feels mostly the same

That's because those languages are designed to be edited by Nano. docx files aren't.

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