Comment by tptacek
13 years ago
What an embarrassing post to be occupying the top of this thread. Blaming Markdown.pl for security flaws? I suppose the memory corruption bugs in the "optimized" C Markdown parsers are somehow his fault too?
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.
The punchlines were this:
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.
Except that the source code specifically tells you to report bugs to him.
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.
> What an embarrassing post to be occupying the top of this thread. Blaming Markdown.pl for security flaws?
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!"
> 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.
2 replies →
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.
>> But he considers himself the BDFL of Markdown
Well he needs to be something other than a pathetic apple fanboy! :D