from Hacker News

Show HN: Clayoven – beautiful website generator aimed at math-heavy sites

by artagnon on 4/4/21, 12:12 PM with 26 comments

  • by cseleborg on 4/4/21, 1:08 PM

    The adjective 'beautiful' for software is increasingly becoming a turn-off for me. Perhaps with the exception of Sublime Text, there is no software that I routinely use for its pleasing aesthetics. I'm more interested in fast, intuitive, pragmatic software. Beautiful makes me thing that other, more important things have been given lower priority.

    What exactly makes Clayoven beautiful? It seems to have a great niche purpose. Shouldn't the first adjective be something related to what math users would value?

  • by loloquwowndueo on 4/4/21, 4:58 PM

    Doesn’t look very carefully crafted for something they claim to be “beautiful”.

    > There is no published gem. To get started, clone, run bundle to install the required gems, and put bin/clayoven in $PATH.

    Yuck? Is it so difficult to package and publish a gem these days? Did the author not find time to do so in the years they’ve been working on this project?

    > To start writing, install vsclay for vscode, which will provide the necessary syntax highlighting, IntelliSense support for MathJaX, and trigger-[incremental build]-on-save functionality.

    What about integration with other editors? Will my “beautiful” experience be ruined if I happen not to use vscode?

    Definitely looks like a very “scratching my own itch” kind of project - worth sharing but the adjective used to present it sounds like an overstatement.

  • by Ecco on 4/4/21, 3:58 PM

    I’ve been much happier using KaTeX over MathJax. Indeed KaTeX can actually be rendered server-side. This prevents an ugly flash of unstyled content on math-heavy pages.

  • by jsf01 on 4/4/21, 11:37 PM

    The marketing text in the readme is more self congratulatory than useful to the end user. It’s fine to be proud of one’s work, but the documentation should first consider the needs of the project’s consumers. If it were up to me I’d strip out all the nonsense about the beauty of the code—at the end of the day, it needs to run well. Whatever clever or minimal techniques or linter rules you think make the code beautiful are not relevant to anyone that’s not a contributor to the code base.

  • by zeroonetwothree on 4/4/21, 9:02 PM

    The demo doesn’t look particularly beautiful. Not that it’s bad but just not what I would think based on the marketing.

  • by egonschiele on 4/4/21, 1:47 PM

    Neat project! Beauty feels like an under-explored part of programming. It's neat to see how a language can be designed to be more expressive for a particular use case. I wouldn't make a call to use a piece of tech at work just for beauty but I certainly do that all the time in my personal projects.

  • by timdaub on 4/4/21, 3:43 PM

    I made something similar with KaTeX and Markdown. Mine is plain.

    Demo: https://timdaub.github.io/SSRP/

    Source: https://github.com/TimDaub/ssrp

  • by drran on 4/4/21, 5:15 PM

    I use Marker[0] markdown editor, which has built-in support for MathJax and KaTex for math, and Jekyll, to render my blog to GitHub.

    [0]: https://github.com/fabiocolacio/Marker .