For many blogs in the hacker community, source code snippets inside <code> tags can also be given "smart quotes", which completely breaks any strings that may be present.
You forget that Wordpress is used for many people outside of the writing community. When writing, and if the writer cares about having their word properly typeset, then the author can do so themselves. Wordpress tries to be smart about it, and covert them, but many people do not care about such features. The developers, however, do.
Also, may I remind everyone, downvotes on HN are not for disagreement, they are for factually incorrect statements.
IMO it’s not bad that Wordpress auto-educates quotes, it’s that it does it even within code blocks. Which is inexcusable, for precisely the reason you mention.
Markdown + SmartyPants are a better solution IMO. (And you can install WP plugins that do this and that disable Wordpress’ default quote educator.)
For many blogs in the hacker community, source code snippets inside <code> tags can also be given "smart quotes", which completely breaks any strings that may be present.
You forget that Wordpress is used for many people outside of the writing community. When writing, and if the writer cares about having their word properly typeset, then the author can do so themselves. Wordpress tries to be smart about it, and covert them, but many people do not care about such features. The developers, however, do.
Also, may I remind everyone, downvotes on HN are not for disagreement, they are for factually incorrect statements.