A rule I try to follow: don't waste your reader's time.

Happy thinkpenguin customer here. In the old days I researched hardware for GNU/Linux compat; now I just buy a system from them and everything just works.

> I honestly don't get why Markdown became preferred in most projects over AsciiDoc.

I think the primary reason is because Markdown is prettier to read (and also secondarily because it's good enough).

There are lots of markup formats, but markdown is probably the easiest on the eyes.

> I don't understand why they are not working in the open,

> Fast compilation and nice, easy to read syntax with good default is exactly what I am looking for.

> [re metaprogramming] ... but I also think this is a pandora box.

Sounds like you might also like [Hare](https://harelang.org/). (has some work-in-progress [SDL2 bindings](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hare-sdl2))

{slow clap}

> I have also used Fennel recently, and if Janet is anything as good,...

Fennel was created prior to Janet, by the same person. :)

> It's nice that most of Janes the literals match Clojure

Two things:

* Janet doesn't have a built-in set data structure literal. Need to use a library for that.

* Janet has mutable and immutable versions of arrays and hashmaps (the literals for the mutable variety are prefixed with `@`)

I was surprised to discover that Janet tuples and records (the immutable array and hashmap you've mentioned) aren't the Clojure-style immutable which is designed for cheap updates, but the more usual kind of immutable where if you want a copy with changed data, you have to make a copy with changed data.

I think it's partly due to: people like regular garden-variety arrays and hashmaps, and don't want to use car, cdr, cons. I like my array and hashmap literals.

> killer feature: user provided examples

I agree. [Janet](https://janet-lang.org/) (which, coincidentally, has some superficial similarities to Clojure) has something similar at its [JanetDocs site](https://janetdocs.com/).

Looks like the name is "Xournal++", but the github repo name is "xournalpp".