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Markdown vs Perl: What are the differences?
What is 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.
What is Perl? Highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 26 years of development. Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.
Markdown and Perl can be primarily classified as "Languages" tools.
"Easy formatting", "Widely adopted" and "Intuitive" are the key factors why developers consider Markdown; whereas "Lots of libraries", "Open source" and "Text processing" are the primary reasons why Perl is favored.
Perl is an open source tool with 435 GitHub stars and 152 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Perl's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Markdown has a broader approval, being mentioned in 756 company stacks & 718 developers stacks; compared to Perl, which is listed in 133 company stacks and 64 developer stacks.
I intend to use a programming language which I'll use as AWS runtime and write a script that will comb through tons of files in a directory and its subdirectories and search for simple text regular expressions and process and write the matches in a file as output. I have heard that Perl is good for regex based search but I also want the performance to be good as it will have to go through tons of files for IO. In this post: https://filia-aleks.medium.com/aws-lambda-battle-2021-performance-comparison-for-all-languages-c1b441005fd1, I see that Rust works well as AWS Lambda runtime with very good performance. Which one should I choose as my AWS lambda runtime for this problem? Golang is also an option as it is fast as per the above link.
I used to work in a Perl shop and must admit that the language is very simple for tasks like these, but as you mentioned it's not fast at execution time. I'm now a Go programmer professionally but I taught myself the language while in college purely out of interest and eventually found my way to the job, not the other way around. I've recently been learning a little rust because of how much that language comes up in conversations around Go. I find the concept of the borrow checker nice but I have to admit I feel lost like I am in most flavors of new fancy framework js. That's not to say Rust is really anything like js, but the learning appears the same to me as someone who's convinced they could learn just about any programming language if it was necessary (over time I've seen procedural, OOP, declarative and functional stuff but never programming logic outside of the prolog code I wrote in school).
Go isn't made for your specific task at hand but it's a very easy language to pick up and it has good directory traversal standard library code and good regex (even though with time perl's has been optimized to be faster and I think it's written in C++) but more than anything Go is "cloud native" programming in that an awful lot of new microservice tech stacks are centered around it, docker and kubernetes are written in it, and there's a thriving community whose focus is generally web-first and performance-oriented. This means for your use case there might already be a large cohort of gophers that have asked the stackoverflow questions for you
I personally would push you towards the NYT Profiler for Perl before I would towards Rest, but that's because I know you wouldn't waste any time being able to get to the task at hand and then make it go faster, and I expect all but a few rustaceans would be able to do so with the same speed.
Whatever you pick I wish you the very best of luck!
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 Markdown
- Easy formatting345
- Widely adopted246
- Intuitive194
- Github integration132
- Great for note taking41
- Defacto GitHub lingo2
Pros of Perl
- Lots of libraries72
- Open source66
- Text processing61
- Powerful54
- Unix-style49
- Regex47
- Stable37
- Concise syntax32
- Hackerish29
- Easy to use22
- Swiss army chainsaw15
- Code Less Do More13
- CPAN12
- Freedom9
- All purpose8
- Many ways to do it5
- Familiar5
- Readability5
- Community5
- Modular4
- Smart (does alot for you)4
- Object-Oriented4
- Postmodern3
- It's the best one-off task language3
- For a man2
- Good man pages2
- Auto case variables1
- Single Source Library (CPAN)1
- Multi-threaded support1
- Hashes1
- C-style1
- Multiparadigm1
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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
Cons of Perl
- Messy $/@/% syntax4
- No exception handling3
- Bad OO support2
- "1;"2
- No OS threads2
- Variables are global by default1
- Copy-on-create for interpreter-based threads1
- Barewords1
- Errors/warnings are ignored by default1