reStructuredText: how not to do it

reStructuredText manages:

  • to be very painful to write compared to, for instance, Markdown (why double backquotes around code? I mean, seriously, what purpose does that serve?);
  • to be complicated enough that you often need to look things up, and end up using it in inconsistent ways ('what's the right syntax for a reference to a method in another class again?, oh, I'll just use ``...``: it's wrong but it will do');
  • to not be expressive enough that it becomes second nature in the way (La)TeX does for mathematics – TeX was written by someone who typed a lot of maths, reStructuredText seems to have been designed by a committee some of whose members may have been camels.

There is nothing good about it.


You'll only receive email when they publish something new.

More from 100 suns
All posts