4 ms·

LaTeX should be regarded as a legacy technology, not the future. It's useful because it's a standardized language everyone knows and can be applied across the

by _Nat_ 7y ago

LaTeX should be regarded as a legacy technology, not the future. It's useful because it's a standardized language everyone knows and can be applied across the web, e.g. on many StackExchange sites (at least the TeX subset via MathJax), but it's too limited to be held up as a standard to move toward. For a discussion of some of its limitations and things that can be improved: [The LATEX3 Project][1] (1999). Personally, though, my main criticism of LaTeX is that its logic is static and based in plaintext. The future is in interactive documents (e.g., in the direction of [Wolfram's][2]), not statically compiling plaintext to image-like documents. Of course, credit to where credit is due: LaTeX was a hugely powerful tool that's done a lot of good in the world. It also continues to be useful for many purposes, especially due to its widescale adoption from this bright history. It's a great page for the history books -- but, it's not the future. [1]: https://www.latex-project.org/help/documentation/ltx3info.pdf https://www.latex-project.org/help/documentation/ltx3info.pd... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_Document_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_Document_Format

unixhero 7y ago
Agreed. The future is more within Juøyter Notebooks being shared.
- equdi 7y ago
  "the future is more complexity" is how we arrived to the modern web.
  - _Nat_ 7y ago
    Could you explain that a bit? For example, are you implying that the modern web is somehow too complex? Or/and are you implying that we should've stuck to some simpler alternative than the modern web? And if so, what might that alternative have been? I don't mean to put words in your mouth, just trying to figure out what you meant.
    - equdi 7y ago
      The usual argument in the anti-Chrome threads, which I agree with, is that it's very hard or even impossible to create a new browser and maintain it because of how many features exist and must be supported. Even Microsoft failed. But, I'm sorry, I have nothing to propose on how to simplify the web. And it would also be offtopic here in this thread... :-) I just believe that adding complexity is most of the time a bad idea.
      - _Nat_ 7y ago
        Ohh that's actually a good point! And I'd liken LaTeX to Chrome in that regard. This is, like Microsoft Internet Explorer before it, people have to use it and work with it because it's the standard that everyone has -- not because it's necessarily the best. You're right, the broader issue of ingrained standards creating cultural inertia is a big topic that's probably too much to address here.
- nxpnsv 7y ago
  You mean like cdrom replaced books? Anyhow, i usually put my math in as latex in my notebooks.
  - unixhero 7y ago
    Don't know what you mean buddy. But have a look at Jupyter Notebooks
ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
Traditional, static documents will never go extinct, particularly in fields such as pure mathematics. If LaTeX3 wants to engage this crowd, it'd better offer substantial benefits, a fair amount of backward compatibility, or preferably both. In any event, LaTeX moved on from the original set of macros in 1983 to LaTeX 2.09 (anybody know when?) to LaTeX 2e in 1994... in the intervening quarter of a century LaTeX3 has been a work in progress... Maybe the goals set for the next version are too ambitious (see [1]), but clearly the inertia has been lost, a sign that the project has become fairly stable. As with any long-term speculation, many years from now people may very well get rid of the TeX ecosystem altogether. During our lifetimes, though, I'm skeptical of seeing major changes in (pure) mathematics publishing. As unixhero pointed out, jupyter notebooks and the like will gain further adoption, and the applied math crowd, scientists and engineers will occasionally rant about having to choose between notebooks and LaTeX... c'est la vie! [1] https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/986/43202 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/986/43202
IdiocyInAction 7y ago
LaTeX is precisely good because it outputs PDFs that are relatively simple to parse and display. Any document format that doubles as code has its share of problems - how are you going to print it, how does it fare on low-power devices. Postscript can be used to solve differential equations, yet it is not used anymore.. Sure, there is a space for interactive documents, but LaTeX doesn't even try to compete there. And honestly, I love plaintext way more that any WYSIWYG format. If proprietary Wolfram stuff is the future, then I don't like the future.
- _Nat_ 7y ago
  I suspect that a lot of people'll feel like you. I still hear about people who prefer slide rules (over calculators), or derivative tables (over symbolic calculators), or steam tables (over CAD), or cameras with film (over digital), or dumb phones (over smart phones), etc.. These people just love the tools that they've known; it's part of their workflow, and they wouldn't be happy with a change even if there were some utilitarian motivation for it. And I'm sure we can find people who'll say that the slide rule will never go away. And maybe, to some extent, they're right? Which is to say, I don't think everyone's going to give up the old stuff. I suspect that many people will allow the world pass them by. And I don't know if they're necessarily wrong, to live the way that they want. Just how I suspect this'll play out.
  - sjy 7y ago
    > These people just love the tools that they've known; it's part of their workflow, and they wouldn't be happy with a change even if there were some utilitarian motivation for it. This is a pretty patronising way to talk about people who use feature phones and LaTeX. Newer, more powerful tools are not necessarily better. Just look at the web technology that HN runs on!
    - _Nat_ 7y ago
      > Just look at the web technology that HN runs on! Honestly, I'd prefer a version of HN that had some more modern features. It's the community that makes this place worthwhile. I sometimes wonder if the folks behind HN keep the retro style to make that point about growing a community. This is, perhaps they're trying to say that a business's value isn't just in the technology, but also in the human capital? Or not to over-engineer a product when the current solution works?
TheRealPomax 7y ago
It's always fascinating how people stick with LaTeX instead of the alternatives that passed LaTeX by over a decade ago. At the very least use XeLaTeX, which was "what if LaTeX, but it actually understood unicode, and the fact that maybe people want more than just English". The future isn't LaTeX. It's the much better, native unicode, normal font using, flavours of TeX, like XeLaTeX or LuaTex.
- Tomte 7y ago
  The bigger selling point for XeLaTeX, in my opinion, was "what if a mortal could change the font?" and "if we make that easy, let's go the whole way and use OpenType files itself, not some LaTeX specific auxiliary metrics files that need to be generated".
  - TheRealPomax 7y ago
    As the original author of the ucharclasses package: absolutely.
rocqua 7y ago
It is not the plaintext nature of LaTeX that limits it. It is the stacking of macro's on top of macro's and the fact that there is no 'looking back'. Any kind of 'look back' functionality requires a second pass and the .aux file. I think something like HTML / CSS would make a lot more sense. Essentially, we already have this atm (you have a document file, and a document type). An alternative would be some extension of markdown with a separate file for display logic. I fear it would be hard to get that extensible enough though.
- billfruit 7y ago
  I think XML DocBook already is a better substitute for LaTeX, for most uses.
AnaniasAnanas 7y ago
> statically compiling plaintext to image-like documents I thought that it was common to compile LaTeX into postscript.
xvilka 7y ago
LaTeX3[1] is quite actively developed at GitHub[2] these days. So the release is not that far as many think. [1] https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/ https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/ [2] https://github.com/latex3/latex3 https://github.com/latex3/latex3
F-0X 7y ago
>Personally, though, my main criticism of LaTeX is that its logic is static and based in plaintext. Literally the best feature. Universal, easy to manage with text editors, text processing tools, version control, etc. The future should be going back to this, imo. >The future is in interactive documents (e.g., in the direction of [Wolfram's][2]), not statically compiling plaintext to image-like documents. Jesus I hope not. Text is and forever will be the superlative format for information - images and videos can be brilliant for aiding the understanding of new ideas, but they are awful as a reference. You can search text, you can't search for images or within a video. And those are not problems to be solved - things should just simply be in text.

by _Nat_ 7y ago

unixhero 7y ago

Agreed. The future is more within Juøyter Notebooks being shared.

equdi 7y ago
"the future is more complexity" is how we arrived to the modern web.
- _Nat_ 7y ago
  Could you explain that a bit? For example, are you implying that the modern web is somehow too complex? Or/and are you implying that we should've stuck to some simpler alternative than the modern web? And if so, what might that alternative have been? I don't mean to put words in your mouth, just trying to figure out what you meant.
  - equdi 7y ago
    The usual argument in the anti-Chrome threads, which I agree with, is that it's very hard or even impossible to create a new browser and maintain it because of how many features exist and must be supported. Even Microsoft failed. But, I'm sorry, I have nothing to propose on how to simplify the web. And it would also be offtopic here in this thread... :-) I just believe that adding complexity is most of the time a bad idea.
    - _Nat_ 7y ago
      Ohh that's actually a good point! And I'd liken LaTeX to Chrome in that regard. This is, like Microsoft Internet Explorer before it, people have to use it and work with it because it's the standard that everyone has -- not because it's necessarily the best. You're right, the broader issue of ingrained standards creating cultural inertia is a big topic that's probably too much to address here.
nxpnsv 7y ago
You mean like cdrom replaced books? Anyhow, i usually put my math in as latex in my notebooks.
- unixhero 7y ago
  Don't know what you mean buddy. But have a look at Jupyter Notebooks

ezequiel-garzon 7y ago

Traditional, static documents will never go extinct, particularly in fields such as pure mathematics. If LaTeX3 wants to engage this crowd, it'd better offer substantial benefits, a fair amount of backward compatibility, or preferably both. In any event, LaTeX moved on from the original set of macros in 1983 to LaTeX 2.09 (anybody know when?) to LaTeX 2e in 1994... in the intervening quarter of a century LaTeX3 has been a work in progress... Maybe the goals set for the next version are too ambitious (see [1]), but clearly the inertia has been lost, a sign that the project has become fairly stable. As with any long-term speculation, many years from now people may very well get rid of the TeX ecosystem altogether. During our lifetimes, though, I'm skeptical of seeing major changes in (pure) mathematics publishing. As unixhero pointed out, jupyter notebooks and the like will gain further adoption, and the applied math crowd, scientists and engineers will occasionally rant about having to choose between notebooks and LaTeX... c'est la vie! [1] https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/986/43202 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/986/43202

IdiocyInAction 7y ago

LaTeX is precisely good because it outputs PDFs that are relatively simple to parse and display. Any document format that doubles as code has its share of problems - how are you going to print it, how does it fare on low-power devices. Postscript can be used to solve differential equations, yet it is not used anymore.. Sure, there is a space for interactive documents, but LaTeX doesn't even try to compete there. And honestly, I love plaintext way more that any WYSIWYG format. If proprietary Wolfram stuff is the future, then I don't like the future.

_Nat_ 7y ago
I suspect that a lot of people'll feel like you. I still hear about people who prefer slide rules (over calculators), or derivative tables (over symbolic calculators), or steam tables (over CAD), or cameras with film (over digital), or dumb phones (over smart phones), etc.. These people just love the tools that they've known; it's part of their workflow, and they wouldn't be happy with a change even if there were some utilitarian motivation for it. And I'm sure we can find people who'll say that the slide rule will never go away. And maybe, to some extent, they're right? Which is to say, I don't think everyone's going to give up the old stuff. I suspect that many people will allow the world pass them by. And I don't know if they're necessarily wrong, to live the way that they want. Just how I suspect this'll play out.
- sjy 7y ago
  > These people just love the tools that they've known; it's part of their workflow, and they wouldn't be happy with a change even if there were some utilitarian motivation for it. This is a pretty patronising way to talk about people who use feature phones and LaTeX. Newer, more powerful tools are not necessarily better. Just look at the web technology that HN runs on!
  - _Nat_ 7y ago
    > Just look at the web technology that HN runs on! Honestly, I'd prefer a version of HN that had some more modern features. It's the community that makes this place worthwhile. I sometimes wonder if the folks behind HN keep the retro style to make that point about growing a community. This is, perhaps they're trying to say that a business's value isn't just in the technology, but also in the human capital? Or not to over-engineer a product when the current solution works?

TheRealPomax 7y ago

It's always fascinating how people stick with LaTeX instead of the alternatives that passed LaTeX by over a decade ago. At the very least use XeLaTeX, which was "what if LaTeX, but it actually understood unicode, and the fact that maybe people want more than just English". The future isn't LaTeX. It's the much better, native unicode, normal font using, flavours of TeX, like XeLaTeX or LuaTex.

Tomte 7y ago
The bigger selling point for XeLaTeX, in my opinion, was "what if a mortal could change the font?" and "if we make that easy, let's go the whole way and use OpenType files itself, not some LaTeX specific auxiliary metrics files that need to be generated".
- TheRealPomax 7y ago
  As the original author of the ucharclasses package: absolutely.

rocqua 7y ago

It is not the plaintext nature of LaTeX that limits it. It is the stacking of macro's on top of macro's and the fact that there is no 'looking back'. Any kind of 'look back' functionality requires a second pass and the .aux file. I think something like HTML / CSS would make a lot more sense. Essentially, we already have this atm (you have a document file, and a document type). An alternative would be some extension of markdown with a separate file for display logic. I fear it would be hard to get that extensible enough though.

billfruit 7y ago
I think XML DocBook already is a better substitute for LaTeX, for most uses.

AnaniasAnanas 7y ago

> statically compiling plaintext to image-like documents I thought that it was common to compile LaTeX into postscript.

xvilka 7y ago

LaTeX3[1] is quite actively developed at GitHub[2] these days. So the release is not that far as many think. [1] https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/ https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/ [2] https://github.com/latex3/latex3 https://github.com/latex3/latex3

F-0X 7y ago

>Personally, though, my main criticism of LaTeX is that its logic is static and based in plaintext. Literally the best feature. Universal, easy to manage with text editors, text processing tools, version control, etc. The future should be going back to this, imo. >The future is in interactive documents (e.g., in the direction of [Wolfram's][2]), not statically compiling plaintext to image-like documents. Jesus I hope not. Text is and forever will be the superlative format for information - images and videos can be brilliant for aiding the understanding of new ideas, but they are awful as a reference. You can search text, you can't search for images or within a video. And those are not problems to be solved - things should just simply be in text.