The first things I want to see when evaluating a new tool are:
1) a toy usage example
2) why I should use this over whatever I already use (La/Xe/Con/Luatex, Markdown, rST, Pandoc)
3) who is developing it and why I should trust them (e.g. "this is a hobby project", or "this is free-as-in-freedom with a grant from the Gates Foundation", or "we are a startup intending to sell your user metadata to Facebook when we are acquired in a few years")
There is also SILE (https://github.com/simoncozens/sile), which has been in development since 2012 and addresses these points in the docs: SILE is similar to TeX—from which it borrows some concepts and even syntax and algorithms—but the similarities end there. Rather than being a derivative of the TeX family SILE is a new typesetting and layout engine written from the ground up using modern technologies and borrowing some ideas from graphical systems such as InDesign.
The documentation includes "SILE versus TeX" section; some of the quotes from it: "one of the things that TeX can’t do particularly well is typesetting on a grid. This is something of a must have feature for anyone typesetting bibles. Typesetting on a grid means that each line of text will line up between the front and back of each piece of paper producing much less visual bleed-through when printed on thin paper. This is virtually impossible to accomplish in TeX. There are various hacks to try to make it happen, but they’re all horrible. In SILE, you can alter the behaviour of the typesetter and write a very short add-on package to enable grid typesetting."
"SILE does not benefit from the large ecosystem and community that has grown up around TeX; in that sense, TeX will remain streets ahead of SILE for some time to come. But in terms of core capabilities, SILE is already certainly equivalent to, if not somewhat more advanced than, TeX."
Agreed. The number of language projects that don't even have a basic example of the language syntax on their home page is embarrassing. It's like those articles about new astronomy pictures that don't include the actual pictures.
Flutter is pretty egregious, lots of links, zero examples. It took me forever to determine it is a native runtime platform for mobile Dart applications. They wouldn't even admit that very easily.
Since that question was asked for us a couple of days ago (as the creator of awless), let me tell you that the authors were and still are researchers in Computer Science in public institutions in France. I vet personally for Tom (cf. http://www.lama.univ-savoie.fr/~hirschowitz/ ).
Patoline works well (PhD thesis were written using it) and the implementation in OCaml is nice and clean whereas the (La)TeX codebase is extremely complex.
edit: Funny coincidence, we were mentioning the Patoline project with the team last week.
One of the author's PhD thesis and the 'Patobook' are on the site, rendered, as examples. Unfortunately though their source doesn't seem to be.
From what I've seen in the Patobook, it seems so similar to Latex (or *TeX perhaps, I'm not familiar with the differences) as to be a re-implementation - so I'm not convinced even what makes it 'modern' as claimed is explained.
With the exception of sections, actually. But you could define `=> <= -> <-` to begin/end (numbered) sections anyway.
They don't "choose tarballs over github". They choose darcs over git. Both are distributed.
The terrorism line (at https://patoline.org/about.html) isn't taking a shot at git, it's taking a shot at GitHub, which is centralized in spite of git's underlying distributed nature.
And this is far from the first project to choose a free/open distributed system over a proprietary centralized one.
1) a toy usage example
2) why I should use this over whatever I already use (La/Xe/Con/Luatex, Markdown, rST, Pandoc)
3) who is developing it and why I should trust them (e.g. "this is a hobby project", or "this is free-as-in-freedom with a grant from the Gates Foundation", or "we are a startup intending to sell your user metadata to Facebook when we are acquired in a few years")
I'm not sure this site addresses any of those