Today in hare brained programming ideas— what if we wrote code in Markdown files

Benefits of Markdown as code files:

- docs / code are the same thing

- pretty formatting of comments

- all of the Markdown editors already Just Work

- flatter file / two levels less indentation

- inferred ends/closers from starting the next heading

- directly linkable with href=#___ links

Bonus hare brained programming idea— what if we inferred the conventional class name/namespace from its filename/folder?

foo.rb:

def bar
puts “ab”
end

def baz
puts “xy"
end

def whoami
puts class.name
end

———

foo.md:

## bar
puts "ab

## baz
puts “xy

## whoami
puts class.name

Really REALLY hare brained idea—

Multiple programming languages

- in the same file!?

- with file extension? eg, foo.rb.md

- …

Tradeoffs of Markdown as code files:

- notice I didn't use code fencing backticks around the Ruby code… that would get noisy

- default would be to treat text between ## h2 headings as code?

- comments have to be… blockquotes? wrapped in --- HRs? or something

- what syntax for code comments? //

@veganstraightedge TextMate was innovative as an editor in its day hecause you could specifically have multiple grammars active in one file.

For instance, you could have a Ruby file with a heredoc string where SQL was used to signify the end of the string and TextMate would syntax highlight that heredoc string as SQL.

@harpaa01 @veganstraightedge

Vim, technically, can do that too but there’s no built in way to do that, you need a plugin.

Zed supports multiple syntaxes. It even has it built in. For example a <<SQL heretic in Ruby would automatically get SQL syntax (both highlighting and navigation/text objects/selection). And you can specify desired syntax for any supported language.

Similarly, you get both HTML and Ruby in ERB.