7 ms·

I work with TeX quite a lot and I can't even really understand intuitively the principles of the language design let alone the grammar. Like 15 years later and

I work with TeX quite a lot and I can't even really understand intuitively the principles of the language design let alone the grammar. Like 15 years later and I'm still copy and pasting spells. I'd love to see an CST of my document and figure out why I'm writing the characters I'm writing!

foldr 4y ago
TikZ is the worst for this. I don't usually have any problem picking up esoteric programming languages, but whatever the hell is going in with TikZ/TeX will be forever beyond my comprehension.
- youainti 4y ago
  Take a look at Tikzit a gui for tikz. GUIs have their downsides but they make a lot of sense for graphical output.
- lottin 4y ago
  I find TikZ quite amazing. You make a picture by describing a picture. It's completely unlike anything else.
  - foldr 4y ago
    Oh yes, I find TikZ very useful and it's an amazing piece of engineering. My point is more that I find it very difficult to understand how it works on a deep level.
zzless 4y ago
My experience with TeX is a complete opposite. I feel like I can do pretty much anything in plain TeX, with a very good feel of what it is doing in its 'guts'. I wrote parsers in compilers in pure TeX (the latter was admittedly a silly academic exercise). It took a very thorough reading of 'The TeXbook' but after that I am constantly amazed at how deliberate and tasteful Knuth's choices were. TeX is simply ... elegant. I am not sure what 'modern' bells and whistles TeX lacks that everyone is so eager to see. CSS is a nightmare, even with recent additions, it seems clunky, most of its choices look like an afterthought. It is also somewhat puzzling that same people who advocate for a better grammar would also push the idea of a better markup. So which is it: a better programming experience or a pure markup language that one wants? I feel TeX strikes a near perfect balance here. Most importantly, TeX has stayed nearly unchanged at its core for almost forty years! It is its greatest strength, not weakness. I cannot see what latest fads can improve in TeX
- choeger 4y ago
  > latest fads Context-free languages are the standard for decades now. They haven't been in the very early days of computing due to a lack of formal education of programmers and because they come with a certain, but tiny, memory requirement. What Knuth did with TeX was a violation of KISS. There's no good reason, but several downsides, to mix markup, code, and interpreter state like this.
  - zzless 4y ago
    I am not sure what you mean by context-free languages because literally none of the modern languages have context-free grammars. This includes HTML and XML although I would not call them programming languages per se. C++ grammar is undecidable. On the other hand, TeX's core typesetting language (i.e. not using its macro facilities) is context-free. Quite trivial in fact. Pascal, which is the language used to build TeX is context-free (even LL(1)), as well, which cannot be said about, say, C. I would also be quite hesitant to claim that Knuth, who literally pioneered modern LR parsing theory (and deservedly got a Turing award for it) somehow lacked knowledge or awareness of cutting edge parser design techniques. Finally, there is absolutely good reasons to design TeX as Knuth did. That TeX withstood the test of time for over three decades is a perfect testimony to that.
    - wrewrtet 4y ago
      As someone who is intimidated by the thought of programming TeX, I think the following comment which asserts that it is badly designed seems unlikely to be coming out of nowhere. (MetaFont is apparently better than TeX) https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/602950 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/602950 I'll quote the key part here in case that link stops working. > TeX has two programming systems, the "mouth" (which does macro expansion essentially) and the "stomach" (which typesets and does assignments). They run only loosely synchronised and on-demand. > For programming purposes, they are a pairing of a blind and a lame system since the "stomach" is not able to make decisions based on the value of variables (conditionals only exist in the "mouth") and the "mouth" is not able to affect the value of variables and other state. > While eTeX has added a bit of arithmetic facilities that can be operated in the mouth, as originally designed the mouth does not do arithmetic. There is a fishy hack for doing a given run-time specified number of iterations in the mouth that relies on the semantics of \romannumeral which converts, say, 11000 into mmmmmmmmmmm. > Because of the synchronisation issues of mouth and stomach, there is considerable incentive to get some tasks done mouth-only. Due to the mouth being lame and suffering from dyscalculia, this is somewhat akin to programming a Turing machine in lambda calculus. > TLDR: the programming paradigm of the TeX language is awful.
enriquto 4y ago
> I work with TeX quite a lot and I can't even really understand intuitively the principles of the language design let alone the grammar. Read the TeXbook. No, really, it is a beautifully written text. The program it describes is quite elegant. Most of the complexity comes from modern LaTeX packages, not from the core tool.

foldr 4y ago

TikZ is the worst for this. I don't usually have any problem picking up esoteric programming languages, but whatever the hell is going in with TikZ/TeX will be forever beyond my comprehension.

youainti 4y ago
Take a look at Tikzit a gui for tikz. GUIs have their downsides but they make a lot of sense for graphical output.
lottin 4y ago
I find TikZ quite amazing. You make a picture by describing a picture. It's completely unlike anything else.
- foldr 4y ago
  Oh yes, I find TikZ very useful and it's an amazing piece of engineering. My point is more that I find it very difficult to understand how it works on a deep level.

zzless 4y ago

My experience with TeX is a complete opposite. I feel like I can do pretty much anything in plain TeX, with a very good feel of what it is doing in its 'guts'. I wrote parsers in compilers in pure TeX (the latter was admittedly a silly academic exercise). It took a very thorough reading of 'The TeXbook' but after that I am constantly amazed at how deliberate and tasteful Knuth's choices were. TeX is simply ... elegant. I am not sure what 'modern' bells and whistles TeX lacks that everyone is so eager to see. CSS is a nightmare, even with recent additions, it seems clunky, most of its choices look like an afterthought. It is also somewhat puzzling that same people who advocate for a better grammar would also push the idea of a better markup. So which is it: a better programming experience or a pure markup language that one wants? I feel TeX strikes a near perfect balance here. Most importantly, TeX has stayed nearly unchanged at its core for almost forty years! It is its greatest strength, not weakness. I cannot see what latest fads can improve in TeX

choeger 4y ago
> latest fads Context-free languages are the standard for decades now. They haven't been in the very early days of computing due to a lack of formal education of programmers and because they come with a certain, but tiny, memory requirement. What Knuth did with TeX was a violation of KISS. There's no good reason, but several downsides, to mix markup, code, and interpreter state like this.
- zzless 4y ago
  I am not sure what you mean by context-free languages because literally none of the modern languages have context-free grammars. This includes HTML and XML although I would not call them programming languages per se. C++ grammar is undecidable. On the other hand, TeX's core typesetting language (i.e. not using its macro facilities) is context-free. Quite trivial in fact. Pascal, which is the language used to build TeX is context-free (even LL(1)), as well, which cannot be said about, say, C. I would also be quite hesitant to claim that Knuth, who literally pioneered modern LR parsing theory (and deservedly got a Turing award for it) somehow lacked knowledge or awareness of cutting edge parser design techniques. Finally, there is absolutely good reasons to design TeX as Knuth did. That TeX withstood the test of time for over three decades is a perfect testimony to that.
  - wrewrtet 4y ago
    As someone who is intimidated by the thought of programming TeX, I think the following comment which asserts that it is badly designed seems unlikely to be coming out of nowhere. (MetaFont is apparently better than TeX) https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/602950 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/602950 I'll quote the key part here in case that link stops working. > TeX has two programming systems, the "mouth" (which does macro expansion essentially) and the "stomach" (which typesets and does assignments). They run only loosely synchronised and on-demand. > For programming purposes, they are a pairing of a blind and a lame system since the "stomach" is not able to make decisions based on the value of variables (conditionals only exist in the "mouth") and the "mouth" is not able to affect the value of variables and other state. > While eTeX has added a bit of arithmetic facilities that can be operated in the mouth, as originally designed the mouth does not do arithmetic. There is a fishy hack for doing a given run-time specified number of iterations in the mouth that relies on the semantics of \romannumeral which converts, say, 11000 into mmmmmmmmmmm. > Because of the synchronisation issues of mouth and stomach, there is considerable incentive to get some tasks done mouth-only. Due to the mouth being lame and suffering from dyscalculia, this is somewhat akin to programming a Turing machine in lambda calculus. > TLDR: the programming paradigm of the TeX language is awful.

enriquto 4y ago

> I work with TeX quite a lot and I can't even really understand intuitively the principles of the language design let alone the grammar. Read the TeXbook. No, really, it is a beautifully written text. The program it describes is quite elegant. Most of the complexity comes from modern LaTeX packages, not from the core tool.