Re: Orgdown: negative feedback & attempt of a root-cause analysis (was: "Orgdown", the new name for the syntax of Org-mode)

[Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2021 at 17:46, Karl Voit <devnull@karl-voit.at> wrote:
>
> I chose an in-between approach: defining only a minimal set (name,
> common structure/idea/documentation, Orgdown1, providing a
> collaborative home on GitLab) and hope for a project community that
> will take over (or at least support) from there, discussing syntax
> elements for Orgdown2 and taking the project to its next logical
> steps.
>
> In hindsight, this decision was wrong.
>
> Quite frankly, I don't have the energy to throw away everything and
> start from zero with a different name.
>
> People do not seem to realize what it took to get there - which is
> partly understandingly because I had to learn by doing what it takes
> to get the idea into a coherent and consistent form.
>
> Simply switching to a different name is not just search&replace. It
> would reset the project almost to its very start again, losing the
> go-live effect of previous weekend (whose effect might be
> questionable considering the name discussion), its project URL that
> is now out there, the motivation video which aims to explain the
> motivation to users of Emacs, the EmacsConf21 talk publicity, and it
> would require much effort to reach the status where Orgdown is now.


Hi Karl,

I was at the EmacsConf2021, but I was totally exhausted due to other
chores and spoke to very few people there...

I think that your work is VERY important. I am one of the people who
have tried to learn Org lots of times and got stuck the same number of
times, and any initiative that splits the features - either syntactic
or semantics - into layers of different complexity and importance
will help me very much.

My suggestion about the name is: it's your project, changing its name
is not a trivial task, and the people who complained about the name
did not offer help. If I were you would simply put "find a better name
for the project and change its name to it" in my TODO list as a
low-priority task.

  Cheers =),
    Eduardo Ochs
    http://angg.twu.net/#eev
    https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/test/