alt Hacker NewsI think it's a littly funny he characterizes "Had the right flavor for every different context" as an advantage. It drives me crazy that Markdown is not the same everywhere and I'm still regularly getting confused about *bold* or **bold** or *italics*. (Curse you, Slack's weirdo version.)
I respect Anil's argument that the extensibility has helped it be adapted to different contexts, and in practice the looseness of it doesn't cause a problem. I do wish CommonMark had more traction (and acceptance and use of the name Markdown). It'd be nice to have a standard, at least for the basic stuff.
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In the contexts where Markdown is most often used, the distinction between bold and italics isn't really important. So long as *this* or **this** gets rendered in a way that conveys emphasis, the meaning is preserved.
Single-asterisk for bold is not Markdown. I believe Slack calls their thing "markup". I also find it annoying. So annoying that I just learned Slack's keyboard shortcuts instead.
It took me a long time to see the variations as a plus and not a minus; as a veteran of the RSS-vs-Atom wars, I was long an advocate of Technical Correctness(tm) like any good coder. But the years since then have made me a lot more amenable to what I think of as a sort of Practical Postelism, which I guess is like applied worse-is-better, where we realize the reality is that we'll _always_ have forks and multiplicities, so we should see it as a feature instead of a bug. It's like accepting that hardware will fail, and building it into the system.
I mean, HTML itself is well specified in the streets, and infinitely different flavors in the sheets. I don't _like_ that, the part of me that writes code _hates_ that. But the part of me that wants systems to succeed just had to sort of respect it.
A more intuitive norm, used in other formats, would have been :
*bold*
/italics/
_underline_