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Comment by 4b11b4 | Hacker News Reader

This is.. about teaching people how to write text documents?

Yes exactly. People who write text are not going to be excited about making saving their text such an extraordinarily complicated task, nor will they think it’s interesting in its own right.

This is a dismissive comment, as is the parent. The post is about a well known software documentation paradigm.

I wasn't trying to be dismissive, only in line with the explicit call outs for simplicity from the author.

I suppose I was trying to give the perspective of someone doesn't have a problem with authoring a markdown document for example... and bringing myself back to the reality that for most people authoring a document with any sort of formal (rigid, to be interpreted by machine) syntax is unfamiliar.

Not really. As a techie I prefer a CMS over say Jekyll.

Believe it or not, when I started to learn programming I had no idea that "plain text" was a thing, since I had only been taught Word at school. So I think this is very valuable for many people who work in tech adjacent areas.

Now I feel physical pain every time someone sends me documentation in Word format since I know there are at least five diverged versions floating around, with no easy way to compare them (Word diff is stuck in 20th century), full of embedded diagram PNGs that are impossible to update unless you were the author and inconsistent styling on top of that.

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