Hacker News Reader

Day 1: we’ll adopt a simple markup language because our users are not programmers

Day 2: our users have complicated needs so we’ll basically reinvent Lisp expressions, but worse.

Day N: whatever this markup language is

——

I’ve seen this happen so many times it’s not even funny anymore. Well, at least it’s not YAML.

Ironically it wasn't even intentional. Wikipedia users discovered a way to create an if statement by themselves, originally there was no conditionals.

Anyways, now a days you can use lua, so most of the wikisyntax is just glue code calling a lua program

> so we’ll basically reinvent Lisp expressions, but worse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

Reply on news.ycombinator.com