Comment by simonmic

Welcome again to PTA, HN friends!

I set up the plaintextaccounting.org site in 2016, to grow a more organised info hub and community around ledger (2003), hledger (2007), beancount (2008), and the many related apps and resources. I'm happy to answer questions; there's also a FAQ on the site.

I don't spend as much time as I'd like making the site and docs better. Feedback and help is always welcome. Stability, efficiency, and longevity are all important, which is one reason it remains fairly simple.

This style of tools and workflows for bookkeeping/accounting, which I named "plain text accounting" for convenience, but was first popularised by Ledger starting in 2003, has a number of aspects; it's not so easy to explain briefly. I think a key one is the use of textual domain specific languages for interacting with the accounting software's internal data model. I mean the various file formats of the PTA tools (describing data), and also the tools' command line interfaces and related scripts and idioms (describing reports or actions).

Textual languages are more expressive and flexible, version controllable, and modular/scriptable/glueable than GUIs, which tend to be more static in their capabilities. Note once you have one text DSL, it's relatively easy to add more, eg custom formats that better fit your needs. And such DSLs need not preclude GUIs; they can be an alternative (perhaps assisted by smart editors/IDEs), complementary, or a foundation.

-Simon