I can't speculate on antidaily's reasoning, but I can tell you why I don't like this way of doing markup. (I thought I was the last one.)
First is the lack of standardization. Asterisks traditionally meant boldface, I thought, but in some of these systems they mean italics. Some use underscores for italics, while others use slashes. And those are just the common conventions; the less frequently used ones tend to be even less standardized.
Second is the fact that the more conventions these languages implement, the more likely I am to emit one unintentionally, and then have to figure out how to escape the input so it's treated literally, if the language even supports that. (Note for instance the long-standing Lisp convention of putting asterisks around special variable names.)
Thirdly, the syntax rules of these languages are often ill-specified and incorrectly implemented, making it difficult to tell at times how to get the effect I want.
First is the lack of standardization. Asterisks traditionally meant boldface, I thought, but in some of these systems they mean italics. Some use underscores for italics, while others use slashes. And those are just the common conventions; the less frequently used ones tend to be even less standardized.
Second is the fact that the more conventions these languages implement, the more likely I am to emit one unintentionally, and then have to figure out how to escape the input so it's treated literally, if the language even supports that. (Note for instance the long-standing Lisp convention of putting asterisks around special variable names.)
Thirdly, the syntax rules of these languages are often ill-specified and incorrectly implemented, making it difficult to tell at times how to get the effect I want.
EDITED to add: if you're wondering what I would suggest as an alternative to Markdown-style markup, this is an example of the kind of thing I prefer: http://nbsp.io/development/doccy-a-mid-weight-markup-languag...
The syntax is uniform, but much easier to type than bare HTML.