Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
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.
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).
Pros of Arc
Pros of Markdown
- Easy formatting345
- Widely adopted246
- Intuitive194
- Github integration132
- Great for note taking41
- Defacto GitHub lingo2
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Arc
Cons of Markdown
- Cannot centralise (HTML code needed)2
- Inconsistend flavours eg github, reddit, mmd etc1
- Limited syntax1
- Not suitable for longer documents1
- Non-extensible1
- No right indentation1
- No underline1
- Unable to indent tables1