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0 pointswilliamstein11y ago0 comments

I've wondered about the same question, and I also personally greatly prefer markdown. I got into Python in 2002, and my recollection is that RST was introduced a few years before Markdown. Thus RST was more mature than Markdown at the time when Python documentation was a disaster zone and people were looking around for technology on which to build Sphinx. So I think RST versus Markdown for Python is more or less a "historical accident"; by now, there's a massive amount of documentation in RST, and it's too hard to switch everybody over. This situation reminds me somewhat of how Python uses Mercurial instead Git (see [1]); many years ago it was unclear whether Mercurial or Git would "win", and in fact many people (at least myself included, with SageMath!) thought incorrectly that Mercurial would win. Hindsight is 20/20, and fixing making the wrong bet on which technology will win can be extremely painful (at least it was very hard for us to switch SageMath from Mercurial to Git).

[1] https://docs.python.org/devguide/faq.html#where-can-i-learn-...

0 comments

scrollaway11y ago

Yeah you're absolutely right. RST was great when Markdown wasn't around, but Markdown is just better.

It's a bit of a toughie, the python community doesn't have much to deal with Markdown itself. pypi expects rst etc. There's also very few tools available in general, which is a huge shame.

Part of this is due to different Markdown "flavours". At this point though, Github being the largest provider of Markdown, a safe bet would be to standardize on Github's flavour and call it a day.

williamsteinOP11y ago

"a safe bet would be to standardize on Github's flavour and call it a day." - yes, definitely. That's precisely what I'm doing in SageMathCloud.

dragonwriter11y ago

> I got into Python in 2002, and my recollection is that RST was introduced a few years before Markdown.

That's true: According to Wikipedia RST is from 2002 (so is AsciiDoc), Markdown from 2004. Perhaps also important though is that RST was introduced as a direct successor to StructuredText, which apparently, had some currency in the Python community previously.

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