You whole conter-argument is "programmer-think", none of this _foo_bar or even paths is that relevant in the broadest use cases of the markup
> Markdown was primarily a pragmatic thing that worked with people writing without needing to think of many rules, and that's exactly why it got so popular.
That's wishful thinking, the whitespacing, especially in such common thing as lists, is something that requires thinking. And with urls it's a common fail to forget which () [] go where.
And there is nothing pragmatic/conventions about this strong/emphasis nonsense, that's just following HTML <em> spec, none of common email/blog post plain text writers think in HTML standard, they think in terms of bold/italic/underline
> Wanting /italics/ is just your opinion, not some objective ideal.
Wanting is not an opinion, it's a desire. Also /italics/ is objectively more intuitive
> Markdown was primarily a pragmatic thing that worked with people writing without needing to think of many rules, and that's exactly why it got so popular.
That's wishful thinking, the whitespacing, especially in such common thing as lists, is something that requires thinking. And with urls it's a common fail to forget which () [] go where. And there is nothing pragmatic/conventions about this strong/emphasis nonsense, that's just following HTML <em> spec, none of common email/blog post plain text writers think in HTML standard, they think in terms of bold/italic/underline
> Wanting /italics/ is just your opinion, not some objective ideal.
Wanting is not an opinion, it's a desire. Also /italics/ is objectively more intuitive