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Arc

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Arc vs Markdown: What are the differences?

Arc: A dialect of the Lisp programming language developed by Paul Graham and Robert Morris. Arc is designed for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that's what we've aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software; Markdown: Text-to-HTML conversion tool/syntax for web writers, by John Gruber. Markdown is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.

Arc and Markdown belong to "Languages" category of the tech stack.

Asana, Code School, and GoSquared are some of the popular companies that use Markdown, whereas Arc is used by Helpful, Cask, and Icalia Labs. Markdown has a broader approval, being mentioned in 756 company stacks & 718 developers stacks; compared to Arc, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.

Decisions about Arc and Markdown

AsciiDoc belongs to the family of lightweight markup languages, the most renowned of which is Markdown. AsciiDoc stands out from this group because it supports all the structural elements necessary for drafting articles, technical manuals, books, presentations and prose.

This includes, for example, admonitions, variables, the include statement, example blocks, footnotes, keyboard macro, equations and formular support (albeid only with asciidoctor and installed plugin iirc), automatic toc and header, description lists, actually usable tables, etc ...

In combination with Antora one can built the most awesome, versioned, and Dont-Repeat-Yourself but-also "Fully-Explain-without-just-Linking" documentation ever.

GitHub has built-in support for it, albeid not for it's include directive, though that can be dealt with by using CI to invoke asciidoctor-reducer or publishing a github page that has been rendered using the asciidoctor/antora renderer.

https://docs.checkmk.com/ uses Asciidoctor. Linus Torvalds once recommended Asciidoctor (1).

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Pros of Arc
Pros of Markdown
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 345
      Easy formatting
    • 246
      Widely adopted
    • 194
      Intuitive
    • 132
      Github integration
    • 41
      Great for note taking
    • 2
      Defacto GitHub lingo

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    Cons of Arc
    Cons of Markdown
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      • 2
        Cannot centralise (HTML code needed)
      • 1
        Inconsistend flavours eg github, reddit, mmd etc
      • 1
        Limited syntax
      • 1
        Not suitable for longer documents
      • 1
        Non-extensible
      • 1
        No right indentation
      • 1
        No underline
      • 1
        Unable to indent tables

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      What is Arc?

      Arc is designed for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that's what we've aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software.

      What is Markdown?

      Markdown is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      What companies use Arc?
      What companies use Markdown?
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      Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

      What tools integrate with Arc?
      What tools integrate with Markdown?

      Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

      What are some alternatives to Arc and Markdown?
      Akutan
      A distributed knowledge graph store. Knowledge graphs are suitable for modeling data that is highly interconnected by many types of relationships, like encyclopedic information about the world.
      JavaScript
      JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
      Python
      Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
      Node.js
      Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
      HTML5
      HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.
      See all alternatives