6 ms·

> RE: ugly and fragile instance of a poorly designed, inherently unreadable, archaic language That's a lot of hate for LaTeX, and some of it is warranted, but

> RE: ugly and fragile instance of a poorly designed, inherently unreadable, archaic language That's a lot of hate for LaTeX, and some of it is warranted, but you have to think of the results, not the source... It's not the source code that people are in love with, but the result (rendered PDF or via MathJax/KaTeX on the web). The "ugly" markup syntax allows you to produce beautiful, versatile, well designed, readable, and modern math equations. As for the latex source code, I think it's redeeming qualities are the fact that it is a standard (with over 40+ years track record). It's definitely not readable, or user-friendly (try adding or forgetting a single }), but people seem to get used to it after a while. Another thing I could say in defence of tex syntax, is that it is necessary complexity. If it wasn't the backslash-macros and curly braces, we would need some other way to express structure in equations, so the same complexity would be present in a new look.

zzless 4y ago
What a great summary! Unfortunately, many discussions of TeX vs alternatives are somewhat thin on details and are instead trading on emotions. As you mentioned in your comment, the choices made by Knuth are far from random. He even made it possible for anyone to change them! Not many people using TeX know that the choice of the backslash as an 'escape' character may be easily changed. Even the necessity of curly braces may be avoided using carefully designed macros. LaTeX took a different path but it is only one possible choice. It is telling that no real alternatives have emerged during the 40+ years of TeX's existence.
- ogogmad 4y ago
  Asciidoc, TexMacs, LyX, reStructuredText, Markdown (admittedly, only ish). None of them have become the standard. But some of the ones above - though excluding Markdown - are a complete replacement. Actually, even Markdown stands a chance if supplemented with enough HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS have practically replaced most non-maths uses of Latex.
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    How many of those rely on LaTeX syntax extensions to render equations?
    - TchoBeer 4y ago
      I can't speak for most of them because I haven't used them, but I know that TexMacs doesn't use LaTeX under the hood.
    - ogogmad 4y ago
      The LaTeX formula language is a separate thing from the rest of LaTeX: It's become the standard for formulas. There are some editors that can speed up writing those formulas. Asciidoc also offers an alternative formula language.
  - zzless 4y ago
    The way I see it, this only proves my point. As you write: '...None of them have become the standard...' and this is at the center of the argument. TeX may not be ideal but it strikes the correct balance to become and stay standard for so many years. One can do pretty much anything in bare Postscript (and I am ashamed to admit, I have) or even 'handmade' PDF but it does not make it a good alternative to TeX. I have experimented with alternative syntaxes (apologies it this is not the correct plural of 'syntax') but had to give all of them up due to a number of flaws. These experiments gave me a new appreciation for Knuth's choices.
    - ogogmad 4y ago
      I disagree. I think Latex will soon become legacy like Cobol. HTML and CSS basically do a lot more than Latex does - except for maths things - and are far more widely known, and far more forgiving. Also importantly, they support hyperlinks, animations, and inline interactive scripts. It seems that HTML and CSS with the appropriate CSS styles and shorthands (like Markdown) could eat up everything that Latex does and much more. I don't know if Latex can survive the onslaught.
- eviks 4y ago
  > It is telling that no real alternatives have emerged during the 40+ years of TeX's existence. But what does it tell you that such an ugliness remains and the way to fix it is relatively unknown? It surely can't be a pro-TeX tell!
  - zzless 4y ago
    It tells me that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, i.e. what one may perceive as ugliness, countless others will view as beauty or, at least functionality. I personally think that the ugliest design in existence is Python but I admit my opinion is not common. Moreover, I use Python myself, since syntax is not the only important thing in a language (the ecosystem is Python's undisputable strength). It is also unclear to me what specific 'ugliness' in TeX is fixed by, say TeXmacs. Is TeXmacs internal language dramatically (or any) better than TeX? Does not seem so. The WYSIWYG option? There are WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well.
    - mgubi 4y ago
      "here are WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well." not there are not. Apart from TeXmacs I know of no editor which give you on the screen the same result you get on the paper. LyX has not such a feature. If an approximation is ok, then fine, but I do not think you can call it WYSIWYG. Is something else. And it requires a lot of work to do it correctly. You should at least appreciate the technical merits, even if you prefer to use LaTeX for its ecosystem. But as a user of both I see the clear merits of TeXmacs in terms of quality of my work (mathematician), I can focus more on what I'm doing, instead on deciphering the mess of the LaTeX formulas and try to find where to put a correction. I can give online lectures with it, discuss on zoom while scribbling on a TeXmacs document, much of the work I was doing on paper I do now directly on the computer. To me there is a clear difference in the user experience between TeXmacs and LaTeX and I will never go back to write LaTeX if I can help it (I do it sometimes, if my coauthors are using it and do not want to try otherwise).
      - zzless 4y ago
        As a fellow mathematician you may then appreciate the fact that local and global maxima may differ dramatically which pretty much precludes true WYSIWYG (not just in TeX) in that you have to settle for one of the two: visual output with suboptimal aesthetics (TeXmacs, and, to some extent, LyX) or perfect results that you have to compile with some delay. It has nothing to do with the computational power available but rather with the occasional highly unstable line breaking. Even in MS Word it is annoying sometimes to see it resize a current line even though it uses a rather lame line breaking routine. TeX does have facilities for almost real time WYSIWYG (SyncTeX was added specifically for that purpose) although they take some effort to set up. As far as concentrating on the work at hand I have written whole papers without compiling the document once before everything was complete. I admit it takes some getting used to but I prefer something I can grep through to a mere pretty picture. I admit if my work was heavy on large commutative diagrams I might have had a different view. One thing I totally agree with you on is that TeXmacs is an outstanding piece of software. I would just prefer to keep my documents in TeX (which TeXmacs can export, kinda).
charlieyu1 4y ago
but the source is the problem. When you work with 100+ latex files and it is so difficult to reuse the code and every variable is in a giant global scope, you would waste so much time just to trying to figuring out how it works.
Skeime 4y ago
In my experience, that’s not entirely true. Some of my mathematician friends claim that they (and other people they know) often rather read the source code than the type-set result. I’m inclined to believe it because the biggest problem with LaTeX (to me) is jumping between the source and the result while editing, especially when formulas are involved. (Syncing tools help, but they’re far from perfect.) So it is often more convenient to just work with the source but this leads to problems where mis-typeset formulas don’t get recognized because too little time is spend with the result and they look fine in the source. And then people start reading the source code of other people’s papers because it’s more understandable, making the whole thing absurd.
walnutclosefarm 4y ago
> That's a lot of hate for LaTeX, and some of it is warranted, but you have to think of the results, not the source I cannot think of the results separately from the source. I am not wired to appreciate Potemkin beauty.
_tom_ 4y ago
> you have to think of the results, not the source You can. But it's equally valid to look at the source and say "this should have been replaced long ago" Which is really has, except for tiny markets. No reason it can't be improved on drastically.

zzless 4y ago

What a great summary! Unfortunately, many discussions of TeX vs alternatives are somewhat thin on details and are instead trading on emotions. As you mentioned in your comment, the choices made by Knuth are far from random. He even made it possible for anyone to change them! Not many people using TeX know that the choice of the backslash as an 'escape' character may be easily changed. Even the necessity of curly braces may be avoided using carefully designed macros. LaTeX took a different path but it is only one possible choice. It is telling that no real alternatives have emerged during the 40+ years of TeX's existence.

ogogmad 4y ago
Asciidoc, TexMacs, LyX, reStructuredText, Markdown (admittedly, only ish). None of them have become the standard. But some of the ones above - though excluding Markdown - are a complete replacement. Actually, even Markdown stands a chance if supplemented with enough HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS have practically replaced most non-maths uses of Latex.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  How many of those rely on LaTeX syntax extensions to render equations?
  - TchoBeer 4y ago
    I can't speak for most of them because I haven't used them, but I know that TexMacs doesn't use LaTeX under the hood.
  - ogogmad 4y ago
    The LaTeX formula language is a separate thing from the rest of LaTeX: It's become the standard for formulas. There are some editors that can speed up writing those formulas. Asciidoc also offers an alternative formula language.
- zzless 4y ago
  The way I see it, this only proves my point. As you write: '...None of them have become the standard...' and this is at the center of the argument. TeX may not be ideal but it strikes the correct balance to become and stay standard for so many years. One can do pretty much anything in bare Postscript (and I am ashamed to admit, I have) or even 'handmade' PDF but it does not make it a good alternative to TeX. I have experimented with alternative syntaxes (apologies it this is not the correct plural of 'syntax') but had to give all of them up due to a number of flaws. These experiments gave me a new appreciation for Knuth's choices.
  - ogogmad 4y ago
    I disagree. I think Latex will soon become legacy like Cobol. HTML and CSS basically do a lot more than Latex does - except for maths things - and are far more widely known, and far more forgiving. Also importantly, they support hyperlinks, animations, and inline interactive scripts. It seems that HTML and CSS with the appropriate CSS styles and shorthands (like Markdown) could eat up everything that Latex does and much more. I don't know if Latex can survive the onslaught.
eviks 4y ago
> It is telling that no real alternatives have emerged during the 40+ years of TeX's existence. But what does it tell you that such an ugliness remains and the way to fix it is relatively unknown? It surely can't be a pro-TeX tell!
- zzless 4y ago
  It tells me that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, i.e. what one may perceive as ugliness, countless others will view as beauty or, at least functionality. I personally think that the ugliest design in existence is Python but I admit my opinion is not common. Moreover, I use Python myself, since syntax is not the only important thing in a language (the ecosystem is Python's undisputable strength). It is also unclear to me what specific 'ugliness' in TeX is fixed by, say TeXmacs. Is TeXmacs internal language dramatically (or any) better than TeX? Does not seem so. The WYSIWYG option? There are WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well.
  - mgubi 4y ago
    "here are WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well." not there are not. Apart from TeXmacs I know of no editor which give you on the screen the same result you get on the paper. LyX has not such a feature. If an approximation is ok, then fine, but I do not think you can call it WYSIWYG. Is something else. And it requires a lot of work to do it correctly. You should at least appreciate the technical merits, even if you prefer to use LaTeX for its ecosystem. But as a user of both I see the clear merits of TeXmacs in terms of quality of my work (mathematician), I can focus more on what I'm doing, instead on deciphering the mess of the LaTeX formulas and try to find where to put a correction. I can give online lectures with it, discuss on zoom while scribbling on a TeXmacs document, much of the work I was doing on paper I do now directly on the computer. To me there is a clear difference in the user experience between TeXmacs and LaTeX and I will never go back to write LaTeX if I can help it (I do it sometimes, if my coauthors are using it and do not want to try otherwise).
    - zzless 4y ago
      As a fellow mathematician you may then appreciate the fact that local and global maxima may differ dramatically which pretty much precludes true WYSIWYG (not just in TeX) in that you have to settle for one of the two: visual output with suboptimal aesthetics (TeXmacs, and, to some extent, LyX) or perfect results that you have to compile with some delay. It has nothing to do with the computational power available but rather with the occasional highly unstable line breaking. Even in MS Word it is annoying sometimes to see it resize a current line even though it uses a rather lame line breaking routine. TeX does have facilities for almost real time WYSIWYG (SyncTeX was added specifically for that purpose) although they take some effort to set up. As far as concentrating on the work at hand I have written whole papers without compiling the document once before everything was complete. I admit it takes some getting used to but I prefer something I can grep through to a mere pretty picture. I admit if my work was heavy on large commutative diagrams I might have had a different view. One thing I totally agree with you on is that TeXmacs is an outstanding piece of software. I would just prefer to keep my documents in TeX (which TeXmacs can export, kinda).

charlieyu1 4y ago

but the source is the problem. When you work with 100+ latex files and it is so difficult to reuse the code and every variable is in a giant global scope, you would waste so much time just to trying to figuring out how it works.

Skeime 4y ago

In my experience, that’s not entirely true. Some of my mathematician friends claim that they (and other people they know) often rather read the source code than the type-set result. I’m inclined to believe it because the biggest problem with LaTeX (to me) is jumping between the source and the result while editing, especially when formulas are involved. (Syncing tools help, but they’re far from perfect.) So it is often more convenient to just work with the source but this leads to problems where mis-typeset formulas don’t get recognized because too little time is spend with the result and they look fine in the source. And then people start reading the source code of other people’s papers because it’s more understandable, making the whole thing absurd.

walnutclosefarm 4y ago

> That's a lot of hate for LaTeX, and some of it is warranted, but you have to think of the results, not the source I cannot think of the results separately from the source. I am not wired to appreciate Potemkin beauty.

_tom_ 4y ago

> you have to think of the results, not the source You can. But it's equally valid to look at the source and say "this should have been replaced long ago" Which is really has, except for tiny markets. No reason it can't be improved on drastically.