Whats Wrong with Markdown

> Who writes that out in plain text areas? Nobody. Nobody except Gruber.

I do this. Reading through my recent comments on [Website X] concludes that I use it as kind of an "italics" tag even though there IS markdown on that very website. I guess it becomes more pronounced.

No offense meant, but your blog seems like a punchbag you use whenever you're mad with a technology or it doesn't fit your use cases. Going through some random articles feels like hearing someone bitching about random things when in bad mood. I don't see much value in that: [1] http://www.adamhyde.net/why-github-is-bad-for-open-source/ [2] http://www.adamhyde.net/markdown-ugh/

I'd suggest some things here:

* Do not post; wait. I don't know what was going on when you wrote [2], but you were clearly not in a mood to write anything constructive. Maybe you should have skipped [2] and only write your second article about markdown (not that I really agree with it either (see below), but at least it is developed).

* I don't really see the point in complaining alone. Maybe you should look for alternatives, and post them along with your complains. Or if you don't know any and don't want/have time to look for one, ask people (I don't know if you can easily add things like discuss on Ghost). For [1], I think you would like GitLab, for example.

Honestly, after reading your article about markdown (the long one), I don't feel like reading any other of your articles. Not that it's bad, but I waited the whole article for some things that never came[], and ended up feeling like I wasted my time there: I just listened to someone complaining about something (mainly about being bad for doing things it's not really meant to do), and nothing else. So now I expect to experience the same with any of your articles (and I'm probably wrong), and I may be missing some great things. [] I was expecting some kind of "solution". Alternatives? Anything?

~

About the article:

You complain about markdown, but use Ghost for your blog (or can you write blog posts with something else on Ghost? Didn't see any from their home page). You never mention any alternative.

Maybe because there isn't many that are:

* easy to read without being parsed, with most of the syntax being somewhat explicit

* can be used to produce "clean" html

* widely used (with some flavors but mainly the same syntax)

And that's markdown (to me at least). It's not here to replace html, MS Word, etc. More like replacing bbcode and other ugly syntaxes. You sound like you'd rather use plain html, but do you? Would anyone rather use plain html than markdown (when available) for writing simple formatted text? (well yes, some would.. xD)

Markdown could greatly benefit from standardization, though. That was the one valid point in your article, imho. It's sad but I haven't seen many big differences anyway, except: * some space differences (line breakings, etc.), but no change in the meaning of the syntax * lists must be preceded by an empty line on some parsers * custom syntax for additional parsing (images, etc.) but well, that's not really a problem with markdown, more like a problem with ghost-flavored (or anythingelse-flavored) markdown

It's not perfect, and still wouldn't be even if standardized (but would be much closer); but I see no better alternative. And neither do you, seemingly. (so no, I did not find your "numerous articles on better alternatives" =/)

I agree with the author in general. However, I would write an article about a more general and insidious fashion (fashion repeats itself). That fashion is "I hate typing" or, alternatively, "typing less makes me more productive." Guess what; it doesn't. Here's why.

If you're using programming slang to make yourself more productive, then you're not programming. You're a boiler-plate code generator. Therefore you could be replaced by a program or DSL that a more adept programmer could write. Stop using slanguages and start thinking about what and how you're coding. You'll become a better programmer. Quit trying to fool yourself that syntactic sugar and shortcuts are a valid development paradigm. You'll become a better project manager.

I abhor things like CoffeeScript and Markdown and various metalanguages, because they are speciously productive at first. You type less and get the same result. Great! However, most coding actually requires some thought and the logic and structures don't simply fly off your fingers. It comes slowly and these slanguages stop being useful at this point. So you take the time and effort to learn a modified, non-standard syntax that stops paying off once you get to the core of your task.

I hate to think of how many wasted programming man-hours non-standardized formats have produced.

Reddit, Stack Overflow, GitHub/BitBucket (readmes, tickets, wikis), and it's also used by a couple of CMSs, blog platforms, and static website generators.

Virtually all of the text I write is Markdown. Even this very comment is written in a subset of Markdown (and so is yours).

Adam I completely agree. Markdown is fantastic at something. That something is non-complex documents. What has happened since is that techies have taken that non-complex use case for the tech and made the logical leap that it is somehow a leas complex tool for complex cases. In other words "average users will understand this". The average user likely will for the most basic case and then will be thrust upon a poorly standardized, often needlessly complex hash of a markup extension set for anything more complex. All of this energy at the expense of HTML gaining more users and or web based WYSIWYGs being refined to the point of awesomeness.