> Most writing is about getting words down in a structure that makes sense, and then getting those words in front of other people. Markdown does that with less friction than anything else ever created.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but it's important to remember that in 2004 when Markdown came out it was just one of dozens of lightweight markup languages competing for mindshare on forums and other websites with commenting systems in the late 2000s. Markdown was adopted by popular sites like Reddit, Stack Overflow, and GitHub which helped it win.
Over a decade before Markdown there was setext on Usenet and plain-text email, both of which influenced Markdown. In a sense Markdown represents the continuing influence of plain-text email on our communication even as most emails sent today are HTML.
For those interested in a kind of retrospective about 40 years after Feynman's speech, read "Physics in Latin America Comes of Age" (published in 2000) by José Luis Morán‐López:
> At the end of the 20th century, a large “science gap” still exists between Latin America and the developed countries of the North.
> The description is not intended to be a complete analysis, but may give a sense of the significant development that has occurred in the past half century and of what might be needed to make the 21st century a flourishing epoch for science in Latin America .
> The most developed group includes Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, which have, respectively, about 3000, 2200, and 2000 PhDs involved in physics research.
Feynman, of course, always had confidence in the ability of the people of Latin America to do good physics. In fact his mentor Manuel Sandoval Vallarta was born in Mexico and emigrated to the US to study at MIT. Emigration to the US or Europe is typical of successful physicists from Latin America, including Juan Maldacena, a theorist from Argentina who discovered the AdS/CFT correspondence and has been a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study since 2001.
Anecdotally, I think Europe has more opportunities these days. My friend Gustavo, a high energy theorist from Brazil, got his PhD in the US but now works at the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmo Particle Physics (OKC) in Stockholm.
Documents written in the 1980s in LaTeX still compile and look great today. Good luck doing that with an old MS Word file, especially if it has equations in it.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but it's important to remember that in 2004 when Markdown came out it was just one of dozens of lightweight markup languages competing for mindshare on forums and other websites with commenting systems in the late 2000s. Markdown was adopted by popular sites like Reddit, Stack Overflow, and GitHub which helped it win.
Over a decade before Markdown there was setext on Usenet and plain-text email, both of which influenced Markdown. In a sense Markdown represents the continuing influence of plain-text email on our communication even as most emails sent today are HTML.
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