3 ms·

Typsetting is hard. I think the bulk of problems may come from an impedence mismatch between the expectations and reality of typesetting. How many people actua

Typsetting is hard. I think the bulk of problems may come from an impedence mismatch between the expectations and reality of typesetting. How many people actually look at the output file texput.log? What about using the family of \tracing* commands? Heck, most TeX engines drop you into a REPL as soon as they hit an error! How often do people make use of this, even minimally by using \show and \showthe to investigate state? In my experience it seems like people (reasonably) come to TeX/LaTeX viewing it as a sort of advanced word processor. This is unfortunate, because if you approach it more like a full-fledged programming environment, then it ends up feeling a lot more friendly, if a bit archaic, IMHO. When you're on a deadline, the frustration is real though. I got fed up enough that I bought a hard copy of the TeXbook and spent a week-long deep dive just trying to grok plain TeX. By the end, I ended up liking it enough that I re-wrote my master's thesis in plain TeX, with nice hand-crafted macros for section and equation numbering, etc. This actually made troubleshooting interesting and tractable for me. If I were still in academia, I would probably advocate strongly for having a TeX/typesetting course for graduate students, if nothing else than to give us a good excuse to actually study and become closely acquainted with this tool that we rely so heavily on. I love plain TeX and want more people to see the joy as well.

diarrhea 6y ago
I got into LaTeX (not plain TeX) many years before I even wrote my first line of "normal" code (MATLAB). A couple more years passed before I really got into proper software engineering. LaTeX being understood as a drop-in Word replacement is precisely part of the problem. It is just too arcane and different. If, like me back in the day, you approached LaTeX as an "alternate word processor" and from there delved into its backend/plain TeX, you are in for a bad time. Understanding it the other way around (some TeX, general ideas and patterns, then the rest [macros etc.] just falls into place) is a much healthier, holistic and sustainable approach that just makes sense. But in our case here, that is infeasible. It would require young engineers to learn a completely alien skill and cease being productive for many months. I reckon CS students/grads have the edge here, given their background and different approach.

diarrhea 6y ago

I got into LaTeX (not plain TeX) many years before I even wrote my first line of "normal" code (MATLAB). A couple more years passed before I really got into proper software engineering. LaTeX being understood as a drop-in Word replacement is precisely part of the problem. It is just too arcane and different. If, like me back in the day, you approached LaTeX as an "alternate word processor" and from there delved into its backend/plain TeX, you are in for a bad time. Understanding it the other way around (some TeX, general ideas and patterns, then the rest [macros etc.] just falls into place) is a much healthier, holistic and sustainable approach that just makes sense. But in our case here, that is infeasible. It would require young engineers to learn a completely alien skill and cease being productive for many months. I reckon CS students/grads have the edge here, given their background and different approach.