I do that pretty often as well, mostly because backticks looks better in plaintext than asterisks, and the text ends up looking more 'programmatic' than bold (i

I do that pretty often as well, mostly because backticks looks better in plaintext than asterisks, and the text ends up looking more 'programmatic' than bold (italics/underlines are pathetic, and I rarely consider them as emphasis options). It's also very rare for inline code to be useful (versus multiline), so the backtick is generally wasted in markdown anyways.