• I have to decide whether to use asterisks or underscores for bold and italic.
• I have to decide whether to use asterisks, hyphen-minuses, or plus signs for unordered lists.
• I have to remember all the various rules and edge cases about parsing.
I think it would be easier for me to appreciate your comment if you named some of these other languages. Markdown is the only standardized one I regularly come across that I type by hand, these days.
What are you contrasting to?
As for Markdown specifically- the only thing I regularly mix up is the syntax for links. I frequently reverse the [] and (). But that's just because I don't use it enough to have the muscle memory.
HTML? Also my markup language I created for myself, which is currently not published.
In email, I naturally write things like "...on the example website (www.example.com)..."
Markdown keeps those () in the same place, and just adds the [] so you can delimit the visible text: "...on the [example website](www.example.com)..."
I remember it as passing parameters to a function that requires an URL as an argument. Maybe it's not the most straightforward way, but it works for me
In the worst case, the barrier to entry and exit are pretty low.
First you can switch from WYSIWYG to text editor instantly.
Then you have an outline where you can manipulate your “markdown blocks” [i.e title and its content] by drag n drop. Or extract a “markdown block” as a new note, and leave a reference where it originally was extracted from.
And then [the killing feature], it displays the content of a link, web link or internal link, as a [kind of] iframe, if you prepend a ! to the link.