alt Hacker News(I did not read TFA) Or maybe underdeveloped is better? No, that’s not a loaded word hear me out: the syntax is very unobtrusive and minimal if you ignore the whole HTML superset thing. So people can just start using it. Everyone wants to write bullet lists and some emphasis, a code block if they program. Only later do you want maybe a little more, some footnotes, maybe even admonitions. But that’s just a little extra. The syntax is already pretty minimal; there’s room for a little extra like using `^` (`[^1]`) for footnotes. So one extension uses that. Oh and maybe another extension uses something else. But whatever, it’s a trivial difference. Okay now some book-publishing Markdown has become quite different from some static website builder Markdown and it’s kind of annoying to have to keep the differences in mind because you have a blog but you are also writing a book. And it turns out that implementing Markdown in a way that doesn’t have dozens of weird corner cases is annoying because the whole inline markup thing wasn’t specified that well.
It’s like a microcosm of the burden of code. You publish some Perl script that happens to catch on. It’s good enough; any immediate problems are really trivial. Ten years later though they are annoying. But a new lightweight markup variant? Yeah, we should make it close to compatible with “Markdown” because everyone knows Markdown. Maybe specifically GitHub Markdown. Because if it doesn’t render on GitHub it isn’t real.[1] And so it perpetuates through microgenerations.