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As someone who's been using Markdown since before it was cool, I love it! I think writing the implementation in Lua is an interesting take since Lua out-of-the-

As someone who's been using Markdown since before it was cool, I love it! I think writing the implementation in Lua is an interesting take since Lua out-of-the-box does not support standard regular expressions; it instead has its own pattern-matching thing which is a bit more limited. But it looks like they've embraced that limitation to force themselves to write something that doesn't need a full regex library to be sanely parsed. My biggest complaint is that asterisks map to and underscores map to (in HTML terms). This is not backwards-compatible with Markdown where (asterisk)foo(asterisk) gets you foo, and it feels objectively backwards, if that makes sense. I wonder if there's any chance they could reverse that.

bjeanes 4y ago
> My biggest complaint is that asterisks map to and underscores map to (in HTML terms). This is not backwards-compatible with Markdown where (asterisk)foo(asterisk) gets you foo, and it feels objectively backwards, if that makes sense. I wonder if there's any chance they could reverse that. Interesting. I suspect something like this will always be subjective, but I find the opposite to be true. *bold* and _italics_ make the most sense to me and is always what I wished Markdown did. Probably, this is because I was familiar with Textile[1] before I used Markdown, and this is what it does. Today, Slack also uses this convention instead of the Markdown convention (though I believe it _used_ to use the latter). [1]: https://textile-lang.com/ https://textile-lang.com/
- Cyberdog 4y ago
 > Interesting. I suspect something like this will always be subjective, but I find the opposite to be true. bold and _italics_ make the most sense to me and is always what I wished Markdown did. Yeah… After posting that message, I remembered that _foo_ in Markdown also results in foo - so the underscores are backwards-compatible. But I've just always used asterisks so I completely forgot about it. So I guess they were bound to make some people upset no matter which one they made and which one they made , and I'm on the losing side. :P Whatever. If this ends up taking over the world as Markdown did (and I hope it does), I'll just get used to it, I suppose. Incidentally, how did you "deactivate" HN's parsing of the asterisks in your reply?
 - robocat 4y ago
 > Incidentally, how did you "deactivate" HN's parsing of the asterisks in your reply? Click the small “help” link on your own profile page: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Cyberdog https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Cyberdog The help link also shows if you re-edit a comment.
 - bjeanes 4y ago
 I just preceded the asterisks with a backslash.

bjeanes 4y ago

> My biggest complaint is that asterisks map to and underscores map to (in HTML terms). This is not backwards-compatible with Markdown where (asterisk)foo(asterisk) gets you foo, and it feels objectively backwards, if that makes sense. I wonder if there's any chance they could reverse that. Interesting. I suspect something like this will always be subjective, but I find the opposite to be true. *bold* and _italics_ make the most sense to me and is always what I wished Markdown did. Probably, this is because I was familiar with Textile[1] before I used Markdown, and this is what it does. Today, Slack also uses this convention instead of the Markdown convention (though I believe it _used_ to use the latter). [1]: https://textile-lang.com/ https://textile-lang.com/

Cyberdog 4y ago
> Interesting. I suspect something like this will always be subjective, but I find the opposite to be true. bold and _italics_ make the most sense to me and is always what I wished Markdown did. Yeah… After posting that message, I remembered that _foo_ in Markdown also results in foo - so the underscores are backwards-compatible. But I've just always used asterisks so I completely forgot about it. So I guess they were bound to make some people upset no matter which one they made and which one they made , and I'm on the losing side. :P Whatever. If this ends up taking over the world as Markdown did (and I hope it does), I'll just get used to it, I suppose. Incidentally, how did you "deactivate" HN's parsing of the asterisks in your reply?
- robocat 4y ago
 > Incidentally, how did you "deactivate" HN's parsing of the asterisks in your reply? Click the small “help” link on your own profile page: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Cyberdog https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Cyberdog The help link also shows if you re-edit a comment.
- bjeanes 4y ago
 I just preceded the asterisks with a backslash.