[nativecoinc]

I guess it’s effective because it is similar to Markdown and other lightweight stuff: things like bullet items are just written like bullet items, with hyphens (or similar). You write it how you want it to be displayed. Granted for a diagram it’s more complicated since it’s a graph and not a tree, and you write it with declarative arrows rather than as ASCII art, but perhaps that in practice strikes a nice balance between being non-finicky and at the same being simple enough (syntax-wise) in order to deal with.

That aside the “unreasonable effectiveness” allusion to “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” is clearly overwrought. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

> Reaching for code to solve my code problem seemed like something that would only appeal to someone that loves code so much that they're probably no good at visualizing.

It looks more like a pseudo-markup to me.

[jessems]

OP here, did not know of the existence of “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”! I agree, that's a whole other level.

[nh23423fefe]

A fine example of a meme spreading untethered from its source.

Can I ask why you chose that title template?

[urxvtcd]

> That aside the “unreasonable effectiveness” allusion to “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” is clearly overwrought. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

It's a meme title, I've seen it a couple of times on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Unreasonable+Effectiveness

Also see: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[nativecoinc]

Yes, an allusion is indeed a kind of meme...

[urxvtcd]

My point was it was no allusion to the original at all. The format took a life of its own, and is now a meme, and the author himself confirms it was the case in the sibling comment. No need to pull that scary ellipsis out.