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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

To save people time: this has absolutely nothing to do with Markdown. The parallels drawn to Markdown are utter nonsense, specious and disingenuous.

What it is is a language for executable mathematics, using Unicode characters heavily so that the source form looks generally much more similar to customary writing styles than the likes of TeX’s ASCII-based $…$ syntax, but which for most people is completely impossible to type in a general-purpose text editor—thereby pairing something mildly similar in concept to Markdown (though not novel to Markdown) with the absolute antithesis of Markdown (which is firmly designed for ease of entry). (Yes, it has ASCII alternatives, see https://github.com/iheartla/iheartla/wiki/Keywords-And-Speci..., but is clearly aiming for you to use the Unicode.)

(I make no comment about I Heart LA beyond this. I am only criticising the mention of Markdown, nothing else.)

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A longer and more accurate title would be "Compilable Lightweight Markup Language for Mathematics" [0]. Using Markdown instead is like saying "Uber for X".

Our follow-up project HeartDown (linked) explores embedding I Heart LA in markdown documents.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language

This project is a good initiative. But I was also expecting Markdown to make a cameo appearance somewhere. "Compilable Markup for Linear Algebra" would be pretty clear to me.

Ok, we've changed to that title above. Thanks!

(Submitted title was "Compilable Markdown for Linear Algebra")

I just realized I wrote "Mathematics" instead of "Linear Algebra" in the suggested longer and clearer title. That was a mistake.

Ok, we've narrowed it back to that.

> thereby pairing something mildly similar in concept to Markdown (though not novel to Markdown) with the absolute antithesis of Markdown (which is firmly designed for ease of entry).

I would say that this is false.

> The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible.[1]

E.g. indented code blocks are nice to read (and you don’t have to think about escaping) but fenced code blocks are easier to type.

Symbols that map directly to the domain seems like a readability win to me.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

> completely impossible to type

It is fairly easy to type if you have configured a Compose key. Usually this can be done system-wide, but Vim for example also supports digraphs, which work similarly. For example Ctrl+K (- gives you ∈, Ctrl+K +Z gives you ∑, Ctrl+K In gives you ∫, Ctrl+K 00 gives you ∞, and so on. You can freely redefine the digraphs to suit your choice of mnemonics. I’m sure Emacs has something similar.

Learning the Compose or digraph key sequences is not much different from learning LaTeX commands. The trade-off is that you can’t infer from the result how it was typed, but in return it is more readable and more compact.

As I said: which for most people is completely impossible to type in a general-purpose text editor. You and I may have a Compose key configured (I use mine liberally, thrice in my parent comment), and Vim may have digraphs available out of the box, but neither of these affects my statement.

I believe everyone in the target audience of the language won’t have much trouble setting this up, and as I demonstrated there are general-purpose text editors that have this built in. Yes, you have to show people how to do it, but then it is completely possible for anyone.

In my opinion, use of such Unicode characters should become more common, because the general method of how to type them is not difficult to learn. It would be nice if operating systems had it preconfigured — maybe we’ll get to that state someday. We have to start somehow.

In any case, I applaud the language for taking that approach.

We point to several ways to type Unicode: https://github.com/iheartla/iheartla/wiki#unicode

One of them on macOS is dragging-and-dropping a Text Substitutions.plist (in the extras/ folder on GitHub) into the substitutions panel in System Preferences.

Perhaps in a sense any format that isn't a markup is a markdown. So John Gruber partly created a language which grew into a family of languages and partly coined a phrase.

I also found it confusing, just trying to see why they would internally say markdown and it would make it out to a post.

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