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For anyone who thinks that the author here (D. J. Bernstein) is biased in favour of LaTeX, he has elsewhere written one of the most stinging criticisms I've see

• wahern 6y ago
  Bernstein's post is more a criticism of Lamport's claim[1] that > Even using LaTeX, which does not make the final formatting very easy, I usually spend less than two minutes per page doing the final formatting to produce camera-ready output and less a criticism regarding the superiority of logical (i.e. semantic) document editing systems over visual (WYSIWYG) editors. Lamport even says[2] > I know of no purely logical system that is currently available. Systems like Scribe and LaTeX permit the user to describe the visual appearance as well as the logical structure of the document—for example, by inserting a command to add a quarter-inch vertical space. The need to provide the user with such commands is a symptom of the deficiencies of these systems. [1] Leslie Lamport, "Document Production: Visual or Logical?", page 6, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2016/12/Document-Production.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2016/1... [2] supra, page 2
• leephillips 6y ago
  That diatribe is simply demonstrating that somebody made a broken LaTeX style. It has nothing to do with LaTeX nor with Lamport’s article. I find it disingenuous of Bernstein to use the existence of a broken style as if it were a counterexample to Lamport’s points. This is not what I would call a “stinging criticism”.
  • svat 6y ago
    The issue is not really specific to this pair of LaTeX styles, in my experience. I'm not sure why you call the style broken: the final result looks fine, and DJB didn't have to fix any errors in the style itself, only in his document. (Also, the author of the style is a translator and co-author of IMO the best introductory book on TeX—comes highly recommended by Hans Hagen in the ConTeXt manual too, as “the book that turns every beginner into an expert”—though of course LaTeX conventions are a different beast and it's possible that the expertise doesn't carry over.) Rather, my experience is that for any nontrivial document, simply changing the LaTeX style (\documentclass) from one to another (like amsart to msripub here, or just one journal's house style to another independent one) is unlikely to be enough; the amount of work required is likely to be much more than the indicated “two minutes”. So what that story points out is that one of the promises of LaTeX (that particular one, of being able to change styles easily) doesn't hold up too well in practice (not many people try it), and the fact that this page starkly shows the typical results one would get on trying is what makes it sting IMO. Or at least so I imagine (I'm not much of a LaTeX fan, more of a plain TeX one).
    • leephillips 6y ago
      Well there must be something that I’m failing to understand then. His example of what he got when switching to msripub is obviously broken; just look at the run-on bibliographic entries. But it’s been a few days and I admit I didn’t read the article with great care in the first place, so I’ll take another look. But if there were actual errors in his document, that’s another reason he should not have been drawing conclusions about LaTeX. Personally, I’ve had much better luck when switching styles. I think, though, that plain TeX is greatly underused, especially as, when there are problems, they are often conflicts among LaTeX packages. What do you do about cross references and bibliographies? (That’s the selling point of LaTeX for me, not the formatting stuff.)