Why I like Markdown

If you are reading this, chances are you know about markdown. It is a markup language used for making articles, documentation and sometimes even websites.

One of the more notable appearances of markdown in the coding world is in the DEV community! For those of you who don't know, yes dev.to articles are written in markdown.

So JavaCode7, when did you first find out about markdown?

Good question. I first found out about markup languages (excluding HTML) last year. I was on my computer watching a youtube video on making a simulation in pygame when the youtuber in question then wrote the docs for the simulation. Those docs were in RST (ReStructured Text). I quickly picked up the basic syntax and used it for the docs of my projects to come. That was, of course until I found out about markdown.

I don't remember exactly when I found out about markdown. I think it was when I joined GitHub 🤔. I think I was writing the documentation/README of one of my early projects. I realised that RST syntax wasn't working! I then went to GitHub's learn markdown page to get the basics down. Even after this however, I still didn't really like markdown.

Wait, if you didn't like markdown before, why write this article?

As I gradually started using markdown more (and RST less), I grew to like it more and more. The syntax is simple 😂 (and just makes plain sense somewhat unlike RST), it is by far one of the more commonly used markdown languages and probably the most used in writing documentation. It also supports some embedded HTML as well as giving more direct ways to do simple things that would take a few lines in HTML e.g. code blocks.

I would say markdown is easy for beginners to learn. It allows small things to be done in small ways, and that is one thing I like to see in a project.

This concludes my article! Thank you for reading and if you would like to see content other than esolangs and/or more emojis in my articles, please just comment!