> And he did a horrible job of it. Horrible. But he considers himself the BDFL of Markdown. Break that down for me.
Christ, you're being a dick. All John Gruber did to you was design a minimalist markup language and write a quick-and-dirty proof-of-concept Perl script to implement it. Just use a better implementation and get on with your day.
If that was all he did, it would be fine. But it isn't. His website still encourages people to use his script and his specification, even though they are known to be buggy. If you publish something on the internet and it turns out be wrong or defective, you have a moral obligation to point that out, especially if better alternatives are available.
Is it insane to try and keep the good stuff from disappearing under the garbage? Have you ever searched for something, only to come across a multitude of pages that were just incomplete, wrong or otherwise useless? A search term for which the gems are buried under so much manure you need all your Google-fu to find the gem? How do you think this will play out in the years to come?
People like Gruber, with an audience, a following, should set an example. If his code has bugs and he is informed of those bugs, he should take a few minutes to list those bugs. He doesn't have to solve them. He doesn't even have to point people elsewhere. Just listing them is enough and saves a lot of people a lot of time. If you can't be bothered to do that, please take your code down: it is nothing but pollution, keeping us from finding the better code.
This submission, which suggests forking or standardizing Markdown, has currently over 400 points. My guess is that "just use a better implementation and get on with your day" is not a good enough answer for many of us, including Jeff Atwood and David Greenspan.
I believe markdown.pl is being blamed for over 100 bugs. Not just security flaws.
> I suppose the memory corruption bugs in the "optimized" C Markdown parsers are somehow his fault too?
Strawman, you're better than that.
> He wrote a text-to-HTML parser with a particularly elegant little language design and got on with his life
And he did a horrible job of it. Horrible. But he considers himself the BDFL of Markdown. Break that down for me.
> which involves writing more than keeping up with bug reports in Perl scripts
He clearly can't keep up with any bug reports, so it's good his life is more broad than bug reports.
> Get over yourself; comments like this make us all look bad.
No, comments like this make us look like we have higher expectations than "it worked on my machine, suck a dick!"