Active Markdown

[Turadg Aleahmad]

Have you all seen Active Markdown? demo

So, Markdown is a nice readable page markup system (like *bold* and _italic_). Coffeescript is a nice readable version of Javascript. Literate Coffeescript makes it easy to write a document that mixes textual markup with code, in the vane of Donald Knuth's literate programming. Then there's Bret Victor's Tangle lib which makes it easy to bind controls on a page to dynamically update other parts of the page.

Active Markdown puts those all together. I wonder any Educoders could use it for building models. It seems like it has a low floor (easy to get started) and a high ceiling (it doesn't get in the way if you end up coding in raw JS and HTML.)

Pros and cons?

-t

[Matt Zukowski]

I'm having a hard time thinking of a lot of use cases where the payoff would be worth the cost of additional tooling and abstraction, but maybe I'm just not being open minded enough. That and I'm probably a bit burned on my recent attempts at pushing CoffeeScript and SCSS here at the Toronto lab...

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[Richard Klancer]

I can think of a number of uses for something like this. One step closer to the world-is-an-active-document future.

When I mentioned it on a Concord email list last week, one of our employees chimed in to say, "I was Alec Perkins' high school computer science teacher!"

--Richard

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 1:44 PM, Turadg Aleahmad <tur...@cmu.edu> wrote:

[Jim Slotta]

can we do it retroactively, as a way of commenting, maybe (ie, as opposed to "while in the heat of battle"...)

j

[Alec Perkins]

Author here. Thanks for the interest in active markdown! I’ve given the project a proper home on the web: http://activemarkdown.org. It has more recent controls that don’t use jQuery UI. The controls are Tangle-inspired, but not actually using the Tangle library.

Regarding usecases, Brett Victor’s article http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/ does a much better job at explaining the idea of reactive documents than I could. There are some great examples on it. He even asks “Can it be almost as easy as writing static text?” at the bottom, which, while not the inspiration for this project, is exactly the goal.

That gets into tooling. Tangle requires authoring a small webapp, using its library and helpers. That’s not particularly challenging for many, but it’s still a significant barrier. Also, there’s no “fallback” format, whereas markdown is just plain text. The intent with active markdown is to have plain text that can turn into interactive representations, while only requiring the `activemd` command. And I’d like to make even that not necessary with an online converter.

It’s still very early on (only v0.1.0), and any input on notation, features, usecases, and so on is very welcome. There’s a draft of the reference using the latest on the develop branch: http://show-em.net/e8ea079ab0fe444a8c83/reference.html (source in active markdown, of course: http://show-em.net/e8ea079ab0fe444a8c83/reference.md )

PS Trudi at Concord deserves a lot of credit for being a great Comp Sci teacher! She played a big part in developing my interest in programming.