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> modern replacement of LaTeX It's one of the most reliable and useful pieces of software, and it seems to be doing just fine. Most efforts at modernization fo

> modern replacement of LaTeX It's one of the most reliable and useful pieces of software, and it seems to be doing just fine. Most efforts at modernization focus on extension, either with packages, other languages, GUIs, etc. > latex in general has awful compile times in part because of it's ancient design. I would expect the "ancient" to mean it's faster, as it was designed for a more restricted resource environment, and Knuth tailors optimal algorithms for each task. For example, the single-pass is ergonomically a pain, because you often have to run it multiple times to get the final output but it also makes it faster. Do you have ideas about alternative architectures that would improve performance?

Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
> It's one of the most reliable and useful pieces of software, and it seems to be doing just fine. Most efforts at modernization focus on extension, either with packages, other languages, GUIs, etc. I love LaTeX and use it everyday, and in particular I have no gripes with compile time, but honestly it's only doing just fine (in terms of usage) because there's no alternative, not due to its own merits. Because the UX is ridiculously outdated. - Needing to compile 2 or 3 times to get the document right (and not having an option of doing it automatically or been warned about it). - Need to include an unusual Unicode character? Good luck navigating the different packages for character encodings, font encodings, etc. A couple of days ago we needed to include Қ (Tajik/Uzbek/Kazakh character) and after a few hours of googling and desperately trying several solutions that in theory should work, we ended up including a vector image of the character created in Inkscape (funnily enough the workaround is less bad than it sounds, because the Inkscape image actually has the character as a character, and latex is smart enough to make it copy-pastable as any other text character). Honestly in 2022 any software should Just Work(tm) with Unicode, period. It's trivial to write Қ in a modern browser and have it appear in HN, for example. - Interactions between packages making a mess, so when you want to pitch your paper to a new journal and adopt their template, multiple errors start to come up, and after trying to decipher some cryptic messages, you find the hard way that some table package you're using is incompatible with the journal template. - Related to the previous... error messages are sometimes extremely cryptic. Especially when something you do causes an error to be caught inside a package you're using, and you get pointed to a line that doesn't even relate to your code at hand. - There is nothing to ease the learning curve, so entire scientific fields won't touch it. Why can't we have something that is as simple as Markdown if you just want to create a simple document with headers and lists, and where complexity is added as you need it? I use LaTeX because all alternatives I know are worse but to me, it's a clear example of a local minimum where we are stuck. It would take a lot of effort to create something better so no one does it, and as a result we have to do with an UX from the 80s. I just wish people wouldn't act as if it were the bee's knees every time its obvious aging is mentioned.
- sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
  I agree the UX is clunky, that just wasn't the criticism expressed in the comment I responded to.
mhh__ 4y ago
By that logic C and C++ should compile really fast because of the preprocessor. It's possible to do a really fast preprocessor so obviously the overall system is fast, surely!?
- sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
  C does compile extremely fast. C++ does too, except that as computers have become faster developers have pushed the generics further.

Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago

> It's one of the most reliable and useful pieces of software, and it seems to be doing just fine. Most efforts at modernization focus on extension, either with packages, other languages, GUIs, etc. I love LaTeX and use it everyday, and in particular I have no gripes with compile time, but honestly it's only doing just fine (in terms of usage) because there's no alternative, not due to its own merits. Because the UX is ridiculously outdated. - Needing to compile 2 or 3 times to get the document right (and not having an option of doing it automatically or been warned about it). - Need to include an unusual Unicode character? Good luck navigating the different packages for character encodings, font encodings, etc. A couple of days ago we needed to include Қ (Tajik/Uzbek/Kazakh character) and after a few hours of googling and desperately trying several solutions that in theory should work, we ended up including a vector image of the character created in Inkscape (funnily enough the workaround is less bad than it sounds, because the Inkscape image actually has the character as a character, and latex is smart enough to make it copy-pastable as any other text character). Honestly in 2022 any software should Just Work(tm) with Unicode, period. It's trivial to write Қ in a modern browser and have it appear in HN, for example. - Interactions between packages making a mess, so when you want to pitch your paper to a new journal and adopt their template, multiple errors start to come up, and after trying to decipher some cryptic messages, you find the hard way that some table package you're using is incompatible with the journal template. - Related to the previous... error messages are sometimes extremely cryptic. Especially when something you do causes an error to be caught inside a package you're using, and you get pointed to a line that doesn't even relate to your code at hand. - There is nothing to ease the learning curve, so entire scientific fields won't touch it. Why can't we have something that is as simple as Markdown if you just want to create a simple document with headers and lists, and where complexity is added as you need it? I use LaTeX because all alternatives I know are worse but to me, it's a clear example of a local minimum where we are stuck. It would take a lot of effort to create something better so no one does it, and as a result we have to do with an UX from the 80s. I just wish people wouldn't act as if it were the bee's knees every time its obvious aging is mentioned.

sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
I agree the UX is clunky, that just wasn't the criticism expressed in the comment I responded to.

mhh__ 4y ago

By that logic C and C++ should compile really fast because of the preprocessor. It's possible to do a really fast preprocessor so obviously the overall system is fast, surely!?

sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
C does compile extremely fast. C++ does too, except that as computers have become faster developers have pushed the generics further.