Spolsky: I was just in a meeting last second with this guy he made a StackExchange called ClimateDeal. Have you heard about that?

Atwood: I haven't heard of it.

Spolsky: climatedeal.org. It's a climate change StackExchange and I guess there's lots of money in the NGO business.

Atwood: Really? I didn't know anything about that. And another thing I don't know anything about that somebody mailed me about and I want to mention since we're on the topic of StackExchanges is and astronomy StackExchange. Not just astronomy but...

Spolsky: Like I'm a libra and you're a leo therefore...

Atwood: Actually Joel, I'm a capricorn though, and capricorns are very stubborn as you know.

Spolsky: And I'm a leo. I know that you're stubborn I don't know about capricorns in general.

Atwood: That's the crazy thing about astrological science. Everybody is born in a specific month has the same personality traits. That doesn't even make any sense at all. It doesn't even pass the sniff test of like: Is this sensible? No. This is like turning lead into gold ridiculous.

Spolsky: What's real is biorhythms.

Atwood: This is a real thing it's actually astro-tech, I guess it's technical astronomy: interfacing with telescopes and astronomical instrumentation. It's answers.ascom-standards.org. I guess they had an existing site.

Spolsky: Terrible URL...

Atwood: So if you're into astro-tech...

Spolsky: Woah, look at all these people, look at all these questions. Is ascom a thing? I think it might kind of be a thing because there are people asking about ascom on here.

Atwood: Yeah, I think it is a thing. This is, when we created StackExchange we were looking at niches and I'm a big fan of these little niches on the internet, I think it's wonderful.

Spolsky: We got to tell the listeners. Ascom is a many-to-many and language-independent architecture supported by most astronomy devices that connect to computers. So it sounds like it's like MIDI of telescopes.

Atwood: Yes, that makes sense.

Spolsky: That's what is sounds like.

Atwood: But only if it can play music Joel.

Spolsky: Except that it doesn't play music, it plays telescopes. And some of the names here I recognize from StackOverflow so I think that there's some overlap. Maybe not, maybe it's just because there are people named Chris and Bob and stuff. It is sort of interesting how these StackExchanges, like the first level and the second level of spreading I asked Jose who's here from ClimateDeal how he heard about StackExchange and why he decided to start using it. He said they're building a whole organization around StackExchange kind of and they're going to promote to other climate change type of organizations and other "green" organizations that they know. And I asked him how he found out about it and he's like, "We were working with these programmers and they suggested that we look at this and they use StackOverflow." Like all the programmers on StackOverflow have an obligation to tell other industries and get them excited about the StackOverflow vision for the future.

Atwood: Anything to keep people off of PHP. It's like keeping people off drugs, it's the right thing to do.

Spolsky: Right...

Atwood: And when I say PHP I mean PHPBB. I'm specifically talking about PHPBB.

Spolsky: You know that there is 99.999% of PHP is not PHPBB.

Atwood: I know. There's a ton.

[5:00]

Spolsky: Let's keep people off that too.

Atwood: Well, not necessarily, I've kind of resigned myself to a world of PHPBB at this point. So, one thing I want to talk about is over the holidays I was able to contact the person who created the Markdown... there's 2 Markdowns: Markdown is the markup language that we use on StackOverflow. There's 2 implementations that we have: one is for the client side preview, which is the wmd control which we had to reverse-engineer... the whole story is in a previous podcast. And then there's the server-side implementation. So one of the difficulties we ran into was these are subtly different.

Spolsky: So the previews are not matching when it shows up on the site?

Atwood: Right. Over the holiday I did improve the preview, like the main areas that were just kind of oversights really. Like we changed some of the rules about bold and italic and for the most part they match now except for really weird edge-cases. I got rid of all the obvious mismatches.

Spolsky: Yeah.

Atwood: And actually I got help from Jacob, I'm going to mispronounce his name I'm just going to call him Jacob, who runs the MathOverflow StackExchange. He was very helpful. He was helpful in sort of troubleshooting that. They used a lot of weird syntax on MathOverflow.

Spolsky: They do amazing things with math notation basically. They use LaTeX.

Atwood: Yes, but, we've talked about that before, but in addition to that they just have ASCII notation as well, and the ASCII notation can be problematice because you're putting characters in sequences that are just really, really uncommon in any kind of normal text at all. So they were running into a lot of edge-conditions as well so he was very helpful so I do want to give a shout out to Jacob in that regard.

Spolsky: Have you looked at MathOverflow lately? It's absolutely insane. Look at all these tags, they've got tags with little dots in them. Why is that? Oh, I think that the dot is like the...

Atwood: Don't you understand Joel? I'm kind of like allergic to math so it's not really good for me to be around math.

Spolsky: Look at the site and look at their tag cloud over there. What they're doing is, they've got like 2 letter abbreviations for tags. So it's like a 2-letter abbreviation, a dot, and then the name. So it's fa.functional-analysis. Or ra.rings-and-algebras.

Atwood: Look what you've done Joel, you've made me go to a math site.

Spolsky: Are you listening to a word I'm saying?

Atwood: I am listening! I'm just trying to tell you...

Spolsky: Look at the tags, this is a general idea that they seem to have invented here. So now if you want to look at probability stuff you don't have to type 'probability' you just type 'pr.' and then it only has one match. You see? Get it?

Atwood: The Hawaiian Earring?

Spolsky: Look at the tags!

Atwood: I am looking at the tags, I see what you're talking about. I've processed that.

Spolsky: You see what they've done? They have this cool feature, that you can just type like 3 letters and it'll only have a unique match.

Atwood: Very rapidly yeah. Although we do match anywhere.

Spolsky: I know but you'll have multiple matches because those 2 letters... because they put that little dot in there, this means that if you just know the 2-letter code for something, you're just going to hit the 2-letter code and you're done.

Atwood: Yep. Cool. MathOverflow's great, it's been hugely popular. There's definitely been demand for it from way back.

Spolsky: I don't understand anything. Like nothing. Hawaiian Earrings, I know what those are.

Atwood: I'm glad there's people smart enough to do this advanced math because I really, really suck at it.

Spolsky: I'm voting that up.

Atwood: Wow, you can vote on MathOverflow?

Spolsky: No, it didn't let me. I need to talk to Aaron, I want to be able to vote on MathOverflow.

Atwood: So anyway, MathOverflow is fantastic and Jacob's the guy who's been helping us out on that. The server-side implementation was where I wanted to do some additional work and it wasn't actually an open-source project. I don't think it was intentional, but the original author did not present it under an open-source license, which means, as you know: if it's not open-source it's copyrighted by default. So I contacted him and he was totally cool about it and he granted the copyright to me. So I was then able to turn around and open-source that and put it up as Markdown Sharp on Google Code and I'll link that in the show notes. I was able to make quite a bit of progress. You know, we're a little bit down on unit-testing, but this is like a textbook example of where you want unit-tests. One of the first things I did was put in unit-tests. Unit-tests for Markdown are pretty simple, they're basically just input and output. You have an input file which contains Markdown and you pass it through the processor and the output should match the reference.

Spolsky: This is an awesome example of where it's straight text transformation, it's so easy to do automated tests, unit-tests, TDD and all that kind of stuff.

[10:00]

Atwood:

Spolsky:

Spolsky: I was just in a meeting last second with this guy he made a StackExchange called ClimateDeal. Have you heard about that?

Atwood: I haven't heard of it.

Spolsky: climatedeal.org. It's a climate change StackExchange and I guess there's lots of money in the NGO business.

Atwood: Really? I didn't know anything about that. And another thing I don't know anything about that somebody mailed me about and I want to mention since we're on the topic of StackExchanges is and astronomy StackExchange. Not just astronomy but...

Spolsky: Like I'm a libra and you're a leo therefore...

Atwood: Actually Joel, I'm a capricorn though, and capricorns are very stubborn as you know.

Spolsky: And I'm a leo. I know that you're stubborn I don't know about capricorns in general.

Atwood: That's the crazy thing about astrological science. Everybody is born in a specific month has the same personality traits. That doesn't even make any sense at all. It doesn't even pass the sniff test of like: Is this sensible? No. This is like turning lead into gold ridiculous.

Spolsky: What's real is biorhythms.

Atwood: This is a real thing it's actually astro-tech, I guess it's technical astronomy: interfacing with telescopes and astronomical instrumentation. It's answers.ascom-standards.org. I guess they had an existing site.

Spolsky: Terrible URL...

Atwood: So if you're into astro-tech...

Spolsky: Woah, look at all these people, look at all these questions. Is ascom a thing? I think it might kind of be a thing because there are people asking about ascom on here.

Atwood: Yeah, I think it is a thing. This is, when we created StackExchange we were looking at niches and I'm a big fan of these little niches on the internet, I think it's wonderful.

Spolsky: We got to tell the listeners. Ascom is a many-to-many and language-independent architecture supported by most astronomy devices that connect to computers. So it sounds like it's like MIDI of telescopes.

Atwood: Yes, that makes sense.

Spolsky: That's what is sounds like.

Atwood: But only if it can play music Joel.

Spolsky: Except that it doesn't play music, it plays telescopes. And some of the names here I recognize from StackOverflow so I think that there's some overlap. Maybe not, maybe it's just because there are people named Chris and Bob and stuff. It is sort of interesting how these StackExchanges, like the first level and the second level of spreading I asked Jose who's here from ClimateDeal how he heard about StackExchange and why he decided to start using it. He said they're building a whole organization around StackExchange kind of and they're going to promote to other climate change type of organizations and other "green" organizations that they know. And I asked him how he found out about it and he's like, "We were working with these programmers and they suggested that we look at this and they use StackOverflow." Like all the programmers on StackOverflow have an obligation to tell other industries and get them excited about the StackOverflow vision for the future.

Atwood: Anything to keep people off of PHP. It's like keeping people off drugs, it's the right thing to do.

Spolsky: Right...

Atwood: And when I say PHP I mean PHPBB. I'm specifically talking about PHPBB.

Spolsky: You know that there is 99.999% of PHP is not PHPBB.

Atwood: I know. There's a ton.

[5:00]

Spolsky: Let's keep people off that too.

Atwood: Well, not necessarily, I've kind of resigned myself to a world of PHPBB at this point. So, one thing I want to talk about is over the holidays I was able to contact the person who created the Markdown... there's 2 Markdowns: Markdown is the markup language that we use on StackOverflow. There's 2 implementations that we have: one is for the client side preview, which is the wmd control which we had to reverse-engineer... the whole story is in a previous podcast. And then there's the server-side implementation. So one of the difficulties we ran into was these are subtly different.

Spolsky: So the previews are not matching when it shows up on the site?

Atwood: Right. Over the holiday I did improve the preview, like the main areas that were just kind of oversights really. Like we changed some of the rules about bold and italic and for the most part they match now except for really weird edge-cases. I got rid of all the obvious mismatches.

Spolsky: Yeah.

Atwood: And actually I got help from Jacob, I'm going to mispronounce his name I'm just going to call him Jacob, who runs the MathOverflow StackExchange. He was very helpful. He was helpful in sort of troubleshooting that. They used a lot of weird syntax on MathOverflow.

Spolsky: They do amazing things with math notation basically. They use LaTeX.

Atwood: Yes, but, we've talked about that before, but in addition to that they just have ASCII notation as well, and the ASCII notation can be problematic because you're putting characters in sequences that are just really, really uncommon in any kind of normal text at all. So they were running into a lot of edge-conditions as well so he was very helpful so I do want to give a shout out to Jacob in that regard.

Spolsky: Have you looked at MathOverflow lately? It's absolutely insane. Look at all these tags, they've got tags with little dots in them. Why is that? Oh, I think that the dot is like the...

Atwood: Don't you understand Joel? I'm kind of like allergic to math so it's not really good for me to be around math.

Spolsky: Look at the site and look at their tag cloud over there. What they're doing is, they've got like 2 letter abbreviations for tags. So it's like a 2-letter abbreviation, a dot, and then the name. So it's fa.functional-analysis. Or ra.rings-and-algebras.

Atwood: Look what you've done Joel, you've made me go to a math site.

Spolsky: Are you listening to a word I'm saying?

Atwood: I am listening! I'm just trying to tell you...

Spolsky: Look at the tags, this is a general idea that they seem to have invented here. So now if you want to look at probability stuff you don't have to type 'probability' you just type 'pr.' and then it only has one match. You see? Get it?

Atwood: The Hawaiian Earring?

Spolsky: Look at the tags!

Atwood: I am looking at the tags, I see what you're talking about. I've processed that.

Spolsky: You see what they've done? They have this cool feature, that you can just type like 3 letters and it'll only have a unique match.

Atwood: Very rapidly yeah. Although we do match anywhere.

Spolsky: I know but you'll have multiple matches because those 2 letters... because they put that little dot in there, this means that if you just know the 2-letter code for something, you're just going to hit the 2-letter code and you're done.

Atwood: Yep. Cool. MathOverflow's great, it's been hugely popular. There's definitely been demand for it from way back.

Spolsky: I don't understand anything. Like nothing. Hawaiian Earrings, I know what those are.

Atwood: I'm glad there's people smart enough to do this advanced math because I really, really suck at it.

Spolsky: I'm voting that up.

Atwood: Wow, you can vote on MathOverflow?

Spolsky: No, it didn't let me. I need to talk to Aaron, I want to be able to vote on MathOverflow.

Atwood: So anyway, MathOverflow is fantastic and Jacob's the guy who's been helping us out on that. The server-side implementation was where I wanted to do some additional work and it wasn't actually an open-source project. I don't think it was intentional, but the original author did not present it under an open-source license, which means, as you know: if it's not open-source it's copyrighted by default. So I contacted him and he was totally cool about it and he granted the copyright to me. So I was then able to turn around and open-source that and put it up as Markdown Sharp on Google Code and I'll link that in the show notes. I was able to make quite a bit of progress. You know, we're a little bit down on unit-testing, but this is like a textbook example of where you want unit-tests. One of the first things I did was put in unit-tests. Unit-tests for Markdown are pretty simple, they're basically just input and output. You have an input file which contains Markdown and you pass it through the processor and the output should match the reference.

Spolsky: This is an awesome example of where it's straight text transformation, it's so easy to do automated tests, unit-tests, TDD and all that kind of stuff.

[10:00]

Atwood:

Spolsky: