I think I know why this issue is now being ignored for at least eight months (and counting).

First note that the languages worst affected seem to be Lisp and Perl, since they get their code partially greyed out by false-positive comment character matching (# and //).  The next most disturbing group of mistakes is false string interpretation, affecting Lisp and VB (and others).  Then, SQL also seems to be affected by false-negative comment matching.

Look at the popular tag counts: http://stackoverflow.com/tags

As you see, C#, Java, PHP, Javascript, C++, and Python are dominating the programming language occurrences, before SQL, which is the first affected.  The highest VB dialect is VB.NET, on the bottom of the second column.  Perl is far behind, in the middle of the fourth column. The Lisp dialects do not even show up until page 7.

So, the affected languages do not show up very often.  That in itself doesn't mean that no one in charge could notice.  However, let's look at the tags of the people making StackOverflow (scroll down to the "Tags" section on their user pages):


Joel Spolsky seems to be mainly into VB, C++, C#, and SQL.  
Jeff Atwood is a C# guy.  None of the affected languages appear in his tags.
Jarrod Dixon does ASP.NET and C#.  There is one occurrence of VB.NET.
Geoff Dalgas does C# and ASP.NET.
Brent Ozar seems to be mostly interested in databases with SQL.


So, not only do the most badly affected languages not turn up very often, the developers of StackOverflow also are not interested in them at all.  They most likely see this as a non-issue.  A bag of rice has fallen over in China, yawn.  They are also perhaps not familiar with the syntax of those languages, so that they do not see the problem even if you show them examples.

In the end, the most we will get from them seems to be "the readme says it should mostly work".  Perhaps StackOverflow is not a general programming oriented site after all.

Now, I don't want to sound so negative.  There seems to be a simple solution:  put &lt;code class="prettyprint lang-whatever"&gt; on the HTML whitelist.

Syntax highlighting language hints
I purchased a new Amanda Furnace in Oct'2013. I am told in order to maximize a warm, consistent room temperature I should set the thermostat to the Fan position rather than the Auto position.  Does this make a difference in maintaining room temperature and is it more costly?
