Markdown: “the shittiest markup language I have seen so far.” (2017)

I tend to think that the best technology solves philosophical problems, not technical ones.

The technical problem of "formatting text" and things like expressive power, etc are just not the problem that was unsolved when Markdown became popular. The problem it solves was: what markup language is easy enough to use that it can become ubiquitous? And the solution was: make something that is mostly useable as a text file but happens to also be a markup language.

The difference from what other people were using at the time -- wordpress-style html formatting, for instance -- was night-and-day, so everyone jumped on it immediately.

It's hard to take this seriously. C'mon - the author suggests LaTeX and roff as better alternatives. LaTeX is equivalent to bringing a squadron of Apache helicopters when all you needed was a pistol. Sure - the Apache helicopters have more firepower but WOW! - what overkill!

That's how I look at Markdown. It's shorthand for HTML and as such is useful for short documents or notes. I use Markdown to record meeting minutes. Short, sweet and I can easily render it in any format I need for managers.

I'm certainly not a Markdown lover. I don't think that taking text conventions from Usenet and writing them down in an ambigous spec is much of an accomplishment.

But criticism from someone that thinks that roff is "very simple and [has a] friendly syntax" and has "too little experience with [modern lightweight markup languages like AsciiDoc and reStructuredText]" is probably not that well founded IMHO.

I would argue, that Markdown is not a language at all. Markdown is a nice little touch up to your everyday txt file, that you anyways edit and read in <your favorite text editor here> most of the time. I write in Markdown, because that is the way I like my plain text files organized and well... marked up. And on top of that, in Github or Gitlab everything looks even more tidy and even the code snippets are nicely styled. yaay:)

Worse is better.