[braythwayt]

As falcolas pointed out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17507718), Markdown was designed to be readable in source.

In fact, for certain types of greyhairs like myself, it is extremely readable in source because it is based on the conventions people used in Internet forums that didn't support rick text.

BBS's, Newsgroups, all of the social "networks" adopted a core set of syntaxes that people still use today, such as _emphasis_.

The history behind that is interesting. We started with underlines to suggest emphasis because that was something you could do on a physical typewriter: Back up and add underscores to what you'd already typed.

When typesetting arrived, we switched to italic because it's way easier to read. But _emphasis_ stayed as a way to suggest _underline_, even if we prefer to render it as italics.

There are similar stories behind other formatting choices, like

  > Some quoted text

It resembles a way that people typeset quotations, and people got very used to reading that in newsgroups and email editors before it became a thing to create rich email ransom notes in Word.