He wrote a text-to-HTML parser with a particularly elegant little language design and got on with his life, which involves writing more than keeping up with bug reports in Perl scripts. Get over yourself; comments like this make us all look bad.
unfortunately many of the other implementations out there are direct transliterations that replicate all of its absurd errors
he outright refuses to either disclaim or fix his implementation
This is important to know if you are interested in Markdown.
Personally, I encountered edge cases almost as soon as I started using it.
We all write code with bugs and flaws and we sometimes release it online.
'Fix or deprecate' is not an unrealistic obligation on a technology journalist with a public persona and a large readership.
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!"
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.
No you don't, that's insane.
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.
Well he needs to be something other than a pathetic apple fanboy! :D