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Markdown vs Visual Basic: 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 Visual Basic? Modern, high-level, multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language for building apps using Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. Visual Basic is derived from BASIC and enables the rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or ActiveX Data Objects, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects.
Markdown and Visual Basic can be categorized as "Languages" tools.
Asana, Code School, and GoSquared are some of the popular companies that use Markdown, whereas Visual Basic is used by Microsoft, XMLi5 Ltd., and Universidade CEUMA. Markdown has a broader approval, being mentioned in 756 company stacks & 718 developers stacks; compared to Visual Basic, which is listed in 10 company stacks and 26 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 Markdown
- Easy formatting345
- Widely adopted246
- Intuitive194
- Github integration132
- Great for note taking41
- Defacto GitHub lingo2
Pros of Visual Basic
- ALGOL-like syntax makes code more readable5
- XML Literals3
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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 Visual Basic
- Specific to the microsoft platform4
