It is not even near to what TeXLive (TeX distribution) provides

> either in what is doable or falling back to start and end markers in one way or the others

The latter situation seems tolerable? Make simple things simple and complex things possible - right? Markdown style is simple, but we don't need to make complex things simple, only possible.

My impression is that the moment you go off piste in Typst you're writing code and calling code, which is back to the "start and end markers" because that's how function definitions work. When TeX was invented that's scary, even most of the mathematicians don't write code, some of the new Computer Scientists back then don't write code, so in TeX although of course programming TeX is how you get tricky things done, ordinary users don't learn to actually code in TeX.

Today every one of our STEM degrees offers programming except Medicine, and the only reason the Medics aren't exposed is that there is literally no room to slot a programming course into their timetable, I don't even know how they sleep - whereas we found room for the other disciplines. So Typst can just go "To do this tricky thing write a function" and the readers go "I can write a function, that works".

Crucially we're not talking about actual Software Engineering. The code in some statistician's Typst document is going to be of the same standard as their R, or their Python, a good engineer would be appalled, but that's fine because it's not supposed to be engineering, the engineering is in Typst itself hopefully. If Typst is a skyscraper, the functions written in someone's Typst journal paper will be like a bookshelf in an apartment in the skyscraper. Non-structural.