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Comment by josephcooney | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to under-estimate the importance of movable type...but what has Gruber developed? Looking at the list at http://daringfireball.net/projects/ doesn't exactly fill me with shock and awe. I'd imagine with his huge following in the apple community he could put almost anything on the app store and it would sell. Can someone enlighten me? I guess my meta-point is, why am I reading software development career advice from someone who doesn't seem to be a developer?

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Gruber is a writer who covers Apple stuff first, and a developer only when he has an itch to scratch.

Just the same, though, Markdown is a pretty big deal. It's the de facto standard for content markup. I wouldn't call John Gruber a nobody.

Notably, it's a piece of software in which well-developed minimalism gets you better results than anything else.

The idea is good, but his execution and follow-through leaves something to be desired: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/12/responsible-open-so...

Eh, again, scratching an itch. He could have done more, but that wasn't his main goal. He doesn't make money off Markdown or anything, so his only real concern with it is how it serves his needs. My point was just that developing software, even popular software, isn't entirely foreign to him.

I've found that [Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) has picked up the Markdown torch. It's got the most-needed additions using the probably least-controversial markup additions. Works great, is fast, well-documented, and is actively-maintained.

Where does it tell me how to write in Pandoc? Hard not to dismiss outright.

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#pandocs-markdow...

I thought HTML was the standard for content markup.

He's a pundit, but he's really close with all of the influential developers in the community. He's more in tune with the Apple community than perhaps any one other person, and his track record of being right is unmatched in the last several years.

hmm, who are the influential developers in the iOS community?

Some names that spring to mind, off the top of my head and in no particular order: Loren Brichter, Marco Arment, Matt Gemmel, Matt Gallagher, and Steven Frank.

Wil Shipley

and also some notable young ones like Joe Hewitt,Jeff Verkoeyen,Peter Steinberger,Mugunth Kumar!

Hewitt has doing some punditry himself lately. Interesting reads, he seems to believe that the open web doesn't have enough direction and will fall to apps unless somebody takes the reigns.

He developed much of Firebug and worked at Facebook in the mobile division (creating the Facebook iPhone app), for those who don't know him.

Track record of being right is unmatched in the last several years? Do you care to provide proof for that? I'm not saying that you are wrong, but this is a pretty big claim to make.

How many pundits are developers? How many have co-created markup languages?

Gruber's technical abilities and his keen understanding of how Apple works give him more bonafides than most of the people writing tech columns in the field today.

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_gruber) says he has a BS in compsci and worked at Bare Bones Software and Joyent before he started doing Daring Fireball and writing as a full time thing, so it looks like he has at least some experience in the software developer trenches.

I had the same thought about his constant use of the word "we". Much of what he said may be true, but it hardly seems like any of it applies to him.

Gruber created DaringFireball and that's enough street cred for me.

whoops. I meant markdown, not movable type.

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