# Yours Truly on The Vergecast: ‘# the **Epic** Story of Markdown’ > Source: > Published: 2026-06-17 15:37:42+00:00 David Pierce, host of The Vergecast: So where did Markdown come from? It came from John Gruber. John joins the show, along with Anil Dash, to tell the story of where Markdown came from and [how it took over the world]. Markdown has been growing steadily for years, but it’s seen a step change in popularity now that it’s been embraced as the lingua franca of LLM agentic systems. I had an interesting all-too-brief chat last week in Cupertino with some people from Apple’s developer tools team about how it feels to see Markdown spread everywhere — [including WWDC](https://daringfireball.net/misc/2026/06/apple-developer-%E2%80%98markdown%E2%80%99-WWDC-2026.png). In a word, gratifying. But the biggest reason for Markdown’s continuing success isn’t Markdown itself. It’s the triumph of plain text files, both for system configuration and for the interchange of human-readable (and thus, LLM-readable) prose. Markdown isn’t really a “syntax”. It’s a set of conventions for formatting plain text. If everyone agrees to the same basic conventions, plain text can be significantly more expressive than a string of unformatted characters. That’s it. So what I find gratifying isn’t that my “language” continues to thrive, because it’s not a language. It’s that the way I like to format plain text when I’m writing, and the way I like to see plain text formatted when I’m reading, has so thoroughly won the world’s mindshare battle. “Ha-ha”, I say, to people who want *this* to mean bold, not italic. (And to Slack and WhatsApp, I say “Fuck you.”)