Quora: Why hasn't D started to replace C++?

[John Gabriele]

On Friday, 2 February 2018 at 14:30:25 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Thu, 2018-02-01 at 19:28 +0000, John Gabriele via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Thursday, 1 February 2018 at 03:00:07 UTC, Walter Bright 
>> wrote:
>> > On 1/31/2018 5:58 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> > > cosmetic features.
>> > 
>> > I tough lesson I've learned is that cosmetics matter, a lot. 
>> > Sometimes much more than substance. There's no getting away 
>> > from it.
>
> I agree but only if s/Markdown/AsciiDoctor/g
>
>> This is one reason I recommend markdown for docs. Cosmetics is 
>> what markdown does best. People *like* looking at it and 
>> editing it. It's like typing an email or a forum comment.
>> 
>> Other reasons I recommend it are:
>> 
>>    * everyone already knows it (it's at github, stackoverflow, 
>> and
>> reddit),
>> 
>>    * it's fairly easy to write (as easy as possible while still
>> looking good),
>> 
>>    * there's an open spec (CommonMark), and
>> 
>>    * writing new language-specific markup formats appears to be
>> something that's not done anymore. There's javadoc, texinfo,
>> doxygen, docbook, groff --- all very ... *mature* technologies.
>> In modern projects: Rust uses markdown, Python uses reST, Git
>> uses asciidoc --- all general-purpose non- language-specific
>> lightweight markup formats.
>> 
>> The only reason I can think of for *not* using markdown for 
>> project docs is if your project is another competing 
>> lightweight markup format.
>
> Markdown was created to write a few HTML pages. AsciiDoc (and 
> thus AsciiDoctor) was invented to be a front end to the 
> DocBook/XML toolchain.
>
> Thus Markdown is for a few small very simple webpages, 
> AsciiDoctor is for creating any form of document from a page to 
> a book. They are similar where Markdown has functionality, but 
> AsciiDoctor has so much more, and most people end up finding 
> they want all the extras. XeLaTeX and Sphinx/ReStructuredText 
> are the competition for AsciiDoctor. Markdown is lacking in 
> functionality people will find they need to use.

Note that markdown is a small sharp tool in your toolbox: for 
writing easily readable (in plain text) docs, easily converted to 
html. For more than that, tools like [Pandoc](http://pandoc.org):

   * convert markdown to html but also to a bunch of other formats 
as well, and

   * support extra markdown functionality like tables, definition 
lists, footnotes, and citations. Don't know how if handles making 
an index.

Also, note that it's not uncommon to write a short script that 
stitches together a handful of markdown docs into a website or 
other larger composite doc. I even wrote one myself: 
<http://www.unexpected-vortices.com/sw/rippledoc/index.html>. 
There may be others listed at 
<https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki/Pandoc-Extras>.