Markdown.pl is one of the worst small programs I have ever read, with well over a hundred outright bugs and misfeatures that continually bite its users in the ass. It's dogshit even by the already low standards of hand-written many-pass regex-based spaghetti-parsers.
Nobody should be using the original script, and unfortunately many of the other implementations out there are direct transliterations that copy all of its absurd bugs, like where if you mention the MD5 hash of another token in the document, the hash will be replaced with the token, because it uses that as an inline escaping mechanism!
See the changelog for what started as a PHP transliteration and turned into a rewrite that squashed 123 (!) unacknowledged bugs: http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
The worst part is that he outright refuses to either disclaim or fix his implementation, and he's repudiated everyone else's attempts to do so. He's a terrible programmer, and a worse maintainer. I'm not saying he should be forced to steward a community, but barring that he should at least have the decency to take it out back and shoot it.
Has he ever been rational w.r.t. Apple? Maybe it's a recent thing and I have a poor memory, but I seem to recall him always being a fanboy (not that there's anything wrong with that).
He's never been rational, but that irrationality generally expressed itself as biting critiques of minor aesthetic and usability issues that Apple was mucking up.
He's let himself be thoroughly trolled by all the gadget blogs that alternate between calling the iPhone the best/worst thing that's ever happened in search of pageviews and as a result became very defensive and self-righteous lately. The world has been divided into those who "get" and those who don't "get" the iPad.
