> The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet.

The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can do online many of the things you needed a car before. The speed difference is between minutes or hours to milliseconds - much more than the difference between cars and horses.

The whole aspect of looking at cars is funny. It’s like judging progress 60 years from now by checking by how much their resolution improved.

Telephones, video conferencing, and internet were available 30 years ago. It is just more available today due to the hardware improvements based on processors using instruction sets that have been around for decades.

I’m very happy they went with simple $..$ and $$…..$$

This is much more natural for anyone doing math or science and also makes it easy to copy and paste math from elsewhere

It’s better that the parser works harder than to force an inconvenient syntax on the user.

The problem with adding so much complexity to the parser is that it's now impossible to predict how any given Markdown is going to render on Github. If Github's parser was open-source, you could at least look at the source to figure out this stuff is handled, but it isn't, so the only alternative is tedious experimentation.

One of the main draws of Markdown was that it was so simple you were rarely left guessing how any given input would be handled (though the lack of standardization hampered that).

It’s simplicity is also it’s crutch. It lacks so many niche things (like math) that every implementation have their own syntax.

The problem with heuristic parsers is that you can't learn the rules, so the only way to use it now is with live preview.

Author here.

One problems is that the parser doesn't work harder yet, and it will be difficult even for GitHub to make it so. The $-syntax is familiar to TeXies indeed, but if the cost is that math won't ever work properly, I'd rather have a markdowny syntax.

In what sense is BPL “over-riding” these communities? I thought they decided not to carry these books in their school libraries, not that students are not allowed to read them even outside of school.

In what sense? The fact that you can't see it from the others' POV is one of key reasons there's so much divisiveness.

I'm not critiquing what you believe. Unfortunately, it's incomplete. You're focused on what the library is "saying" and haven't considered what's being heard elsewhere. You can continue to disagree. But blind dismissal isn't helping.

And herein lies the problem.