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these short descriptions I've read don't seem to answer this question for me - how is this different from orgmode + org-babel + HTML/PDF export? See like reinventing the wheel for one language, or am I missing something?

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Pollen is a Racket language, and gets parsed into an AST and evaluated. You can programmatically generate correct markup using all of Racket.

Org Babel is more about evaluating code snippets in a variety of languages. Even if you can evaluate to produce org markup that's processed it doesn't have the same level of structural integration.

I get that it's cleaner that it's an AST but when would you ever want to generate markup? Seems like a weird use-case

I'm not sure about that combination of tooling, but I consider pollen to be useful as markdown + customization. Ofc its a full general-purpose language to work with, but I myself just wanted it to solve adding sidenotes, footnotes and simple references.

I also noted others using to handle blog publishing tasks like latest post pages and tags and such

I guess in total its a general html publishing framework, and at least partly notable for being built in a lisp, given htnl's usage of basically s-expressions

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