Anil Dash has a long post on How Markdown Took Over The World. We Org mode users may have a few problems with that depiction but it is fair to say that Markdown usage has become ubiquitous. We see it everywhere, even in the most unexpected places.
The most interesting part of Dash’s post, to me, is his history of Markdown. In the tradition of open source software, it began as an itch on the part of a user. John Gruber wanted an easier way of writing his blog Daring Fireball. The original markdown was a perl script that translated some simple markup text into HTML.
In retrospect, I’d say that the real genius of Markdown is that it’s plain text. That means you don’t need a bespoke application to use it. You can use your preferred method of entering text to write your Markdown source. It’s other winning aspect is that nobody “owns” it. Anybody can use it or incorporate into their application without fuss or fee.
We Org mode aficionados prefer Org markup, of course. I’m inclined to think that the syntax of Org mode versus Markdown isn’t that much of an issue but others strongly disagree. For me, the advantage of Org mode is it’s power—to which some dialects of Markdown are slowly catching up—and it’s close integration with Emacs, which is where I do all my writing.
The other big advantage of Org mode is that there is only one. Sadly, Markdown has several incompatible dialects so it’s hard to know which version to master or use. On the other hand, Markdown is not tied to any particular application so you can use it anywhere. It is technically true that you can write Org mode in any editor and translate it to almost any target with Pandoc but as a practical matter if you want to use Org mode, you need to use Emacs.
This post is an ecumenical moment where we celebrate the huge advantages of Markdown and Org mode over their mostly proprietary competitors. We may argue over which is best but we agree that they’re better than their alternatives.