The idea being that much as Java relieves some of the pain of writing object oriented code in C++, finl relieves some of the pain of writing documents in LaTeX.

The idea being that much as Java relieves some of the pain of writing object oriented code in C++, finl relieves some of the pain of writing documents in LaTeX. It helps, of course, to have a deep understanding of TeX and LaTeX in doing so. Looking at sile, for example, on my initial look, it seems that the creators didn't fully understand LaTeX or what makes LaTeX worth re-imagining. At the risk of being insulting, it kind of feels less like C++ to Java and more like Perl to PHP, where the creators of PHP were clearly influenced by Perl, but didn't understand why Perl works the way it does.