Still.
Decades later.
The only spec is a single implementation. Which is probably why approximately nothing else supports it.
CommonMark on the other hand is very widely supported and all of them work great together. I'll stick to CommonMark.
The more obvious reasons are that Markdown was dead simple, unlike Org, and integrated into many popular products, unlike Org.
(Tangent: To be honest, I'm not sure why websites like Reddit opted for Markdown rather than text formatting buttons. It's a good thing, and I'm not complaining, but adding the standard rich text buttons (like the ones Reddit has now) seems like it would've been the more obvious move.)
The underlying claim is hat pypy cannot succeed precisely because there's no clear definition of success/compatibility/compliance. The situation is completely different in the Java world. There there is a specification for the memory model, runtime, aso and you can be sure that when you switch between runtimes, it will just work.
I haven't looked into the actual current state of things though, my last check was a couple years ago. I'd be pretty happy if things have changed, I just haven't seen any sign of that.
In my limited experience, I can only assume people are sticking to CPython because it works. Speed doesn’t mean much if libraries and tools fail to function.
That's simply not true. There are numerous android and iOS apps that support it. There are implementations for Vim and other editors besides Emacs. GitHub supports it, for example.
I have not found a satisfactory (to me) solution for note-taking in Markdown that is open-source, plain-text, and mobile-friendly with local (non-cloud) sync. (Except for maybe Logseq, which appears to be moving in the direction of using a database.)
There are several such solutions for Org-mode.
If you're okay with the stripped down version that's basically markdown but different and that's fine but I feel like most people fall in love with org mode because it's so powerful once you get it going and all that power comes from emacs. So I get the argument that it's no worse than markdown but you lose so much of the magic.
Do they support tangling of source code and export to all the formats that Emacs's Org-mode supports? Of course not. But they have all of what I expect for a knowledge-base on my phone, which is a lot more than Markdown was ever intended for.
> they only support a tiny subset of the format
I think Orgro's parser[0] is pretty complete at this point. If you can find an Org syntax that Orgro doesn't support, please let me know.
However I should be very clear here:
> they can't support any of the features that require the rest of emacs to be present which is a lot of of the value
This is absolutely true and unlikely to change anytime soon. As I'm sure you know, parsing the syntax correctly is not at all the same as supporting all of the features built on top of the AST.
I'm continually surprised that Microsoft hasn't completely cornered the market on LLM code generation, given their head start with copilot and ready access to source code on a scale that nobody else really has.
>The basic file open/save, finding help, exiting Emacs stuff is accessible with icons or the menu.
Or earlier:
>In contrast to that, the syntax of Emacs Org-mode as the one and only original form...
Because there is no other real option. Mobile org users overwhelmingly (AFAICT) use Emacs in Termux to edit their files.
This post was originally written in 2017 (tools maybe first in 2019? though it hardly matters). It's still true today.
Both apps support Org-mode's scheduling, robust linking, and search features to some extent, features which don't exist at all in Markdown.
But that kind of inconsistency has been my overwhelming experience with anything except Emacs. CommonMark stuff has been practically flawless every time by comparison (though "markdown" in general is absolutely not, that's an unspecified mess)
If it's gotten this far WITHOUT a spec, there's something inherently good going on that lets it keep going.