I've heard very similar arguments, for Perl, a couple of decades ago.
And yeah, it's not entirely wrong. Perl was useful, too.
But I desperately want the thing that is for markdown what modern JavaScript, Python and Go have become for Perl.
I want a markup language that supports the most basic things, looks reasonable on the eyes in un-rendered form (so we don't need terrible rich text editors everywhere), and is very friendly to being embedded in bigger documents of its own type or plaintext. It should be possible to have that with a proper, unambiguous (both for humans and for computers) spec.
reStructuredText met a lot of what you are looking for in that "modern" markup language, though reStructuredText doesn't have much of a life outside of the Python ecosystem still.
And yeah, it's not entirely wrong. Perl was useful, too.
But I desperately want the thing that is for markdown what modern JavaScript, Python and Go have become for Perl.
I want a markup language that supports the most basic things, looks reasonable on the eyes in un-rendered form (so we don't need terrible rich text editors everywhere), and is very friendly to being embedded in bigger documents of its own type or plaintext. It should be possible to have that with a proper, unambiguous (both for humans and for computers) spec.