Atwood can treat markdown as critical to his business, he can roll his own, and learn to create a parser and he should STILL start with something like Beautiful

Atwood can treat markdown as critical to his business, he can roll his own, and learn to create a parser and he should STILL start with something like Beautiful Soup. Then he can modify it, extend it, refactor it, what ever. But starting from scratch all that will happen is that he will, after a LOOONG time, end up with something almost as good Beautiful Soup, but with a much uglier code base. And he will not learn more doing it that way. He will perhaps learn just as much, but not more. Reinventing the wheel is stupid. If X is critical to your business get a wheel for X then own the damn wheel and X. Joel himself started with an open source VPN project for Copilot. And I'm guessing that's a pretty critical part of Joel's business.