3 ms·

> Yeah, because the ecosystem is dead. Some of us would call that "mature" or "stable". You don't have to change the basics of the language every two weeks and

> Yeah, because the ecosystem is dead. Some of us would call that "mature" or "stable". You don't have to change the basics of the language every two weeks and have people rewrite everything every three weeks (when the three week old version gets removed from ubuntu). Look at LaTeX for example... ever goddamn academic uses latex, but it hasn't really changed for many years now... is it dead? Of course not.

arp242 3y ago
I don't think there's any mainstream language where the basics of the language change every two weeks or people have to rewrite things every three weeks. I realize you're exaggerating and that you don't literally means 2 or 3 weeks, but I have Python programs I haven't touched in about 10 years that I still regularly use and that still work fine. Some of my oldest Go programs from over 7 years ago still work fine, and I'm pretty sure that if I were to try running some of my older Ruby or PHP programs (some of which is >10 years old) today it would still work either out of the box or with a few small changes (IIRC some of the defaults in PHP changed wrt. errors, so that might need a little bit of fiddling). Even JavaScript – the poster child of "rewrite every 2 weeks" – is pretty compatible. You don't need to switch to $new_js_framework and many people use older stuff just fine. The language itself is pretty compatible (almost to a fault, arguably).
- aragilar 3y ago
  I suspect the issue rarely is the language itself changing, but the tooling around it (in the JS case: bundlers, minifiers, polyfills etc.). I think JS/TS the language is good enough, it's really taking the code that's been written and making it usable on the frontend that breaks.
  - arp242 3y ago
    It's certainly the case in JavaScript that the ecosystem has been changing at a very fast pace (too fast, IMO), but you don't need to buy in to all of that.
tialaramex 3y ago
C is a mature language. If they put out a new standard with a few changes once a decade that seems fine. But they do put out new versions, this year will see C23. LaTeX is just packages (which do change, all the damn time, it's a curse) on top of Knuth's TeX. TeX, it's true, is feature frozen, Knuth has asked that when he dies the version is increased from a close approximation of Pi to Pi itself, and no further bugs are fixed. At that point TeX will be frozen solid, I'd be surprised if it lives another twenty to thirty years, its purpose is digital typesetting and er, you may not have noticed but we ain't printing so many books these days. Once we're not setting type anyway, TeX's purpose expires.
- aragilar 3y ago
  Is TeX that widely used for traditional publishing? The areas that TeX is good at (e.g. academic STEM) don't seem to have reduced in output, and there hasn't been a reasonable replacement in the 45(!) years since it came out, so absent a significant change in academia, I'd expect it to continue being around for the foreseeable future.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    The LaTeX system makes sense under the assumption that you want to produce typeset documents, as gradually it is apparent that you don't, in fact, produce typeset documents, the extra bother seems dubious. Knuth writes books. That's what TeX is for. If you write journal papers, eh, TeX is more likely to ensure you see in print what you intended, but increasingly Maths is done online in forums, nobody wants to wait six months to read a camera ready spell checked document - and meanwhile Unicode means squiggles are easier to write on a computer correctly, and programming means you can express what you meant in (terrible) Python instead of squiggles. The Math professors at the University I work for do still write a lot of LaTeX (whereas in CS it's not so common as it was) but I wouldn't be surprised if an ordinary Maths undergrad can't write decent LaTeX today, so that's a smaller and ageing constituency.
    - aragilar 3y ago
      I'm curious what input method you've found for unicode maths, most of it seems to be input via various TeX-like DSLs (e.g. mathjax), or people just take photos (or screenshots of the TeX and paste into powerpoint...)? Also, (La)TeX gives you a good-enough environment (especially with something like overleaf for sharing) for maths+crossrefs+citations that I'm not sure you can go simpler (I've tried with markdown and rst, but both end up being more of a pain, and the more maths you have, the harder it is to go without macros). Modern word remains a issue as I found out today, and most other word processors have even less support for throwing something vaguely academic together (i.e. with LaTeX I can just start dumping in content and refs and maths just work).
slikrick 3y ago
if it's not seeing security updates it's dead.

arp242 3y ago

I don't think there's any mainstream language where the basics of the language change every two weeks or people have to rewrite things every three weeks. I realize you're exaggerating and that you don't literally means 2 or 3 weeks, but I have Python programs I haven't touched in about 10 years that I still regularly use and that still work fine. Some of my oldest Go programs from over 7 years ago still work fine, and I'm pretty sure that if I were to try running some of my older Ruby or PHP programs (some of which is >10 years old) today it would still work either out of the box or with a few small changes (IIRC some of the defaults in PHP changed wrt. errors, so that might need a little bit of fiddling). Even JavaScript – the poster child of "rewrite every 2 weeks" – is pretty compatible. You don't need to switch to $new_js_framework and many people use older stuff just fine. The language itself is pretty compatible (almost to a fault, arguably).

aragilar 3y ago
I suspect the issue rarely is the language itself changing, but the tooling around it (in the JS case: bundlers, minifiers, polyfills etc.). I think JS/TS the language is good enough, it's really taking the code that's been written and making it usable on the frontend that breaks.
- arp242 3y ago
  It's certainly the case in JavaScript that the ecosystem has been changing at a very fast pace (too fast, IMO), but you don't need to buy in to all of that.

tialaramex 3y ago

C is a mature language. If they put out a new standard with a few changes once a decade that seems fine. But they do put out new versions, this year will see C23. LaTeX is just packages (which do change, all the damn time, it's a curse) on top of Knuth's TeX. TeX, it's true, is feature frozen, Knuth has asked that when he dies the version is increased from a close approximation of Pi to Pi itself, and no further bugs are fixed. At that point TeX will be frozen solid, I'd be surprised if it lives another twenty to thirty years, its purpose is digital typesetting and er, you may not have noticed but we ain't printing so many books these days. Once we're not setting type anyway, TeX's purpose expires.

aragilar 3y ago
Is TeX that widely used for traditional publishing? The areas that TeX is good at (e.g. academic STEM) don't seem to have reduced in output, and there hasn't been a reasonable replacement in the 45(!) years since it came out, so absent a significant change in academia, I'd expect it to continue being around for the foreseeable future.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  The LaTeX system makes sense under the assumption that you want to produce typeset documents, as gradually it is apparent that you don't, in fact, produce typeset documents, the extra bother seems dubious. Knuth writes books. That's what TeX is for. If you write journal papers, eh, TeX is more likely to ensure you see in print what you intended, but increasingly Maths is done online in forums, nobody wants to wait six months to read a camera ready spell checked document - and meanwhile Unicode means squiggles are easier to write on a computer correctly, and programming means you can express what you meant in (terrible) Python instead of squiggles. The Math professors at the University I work for do still write a lot of LaTeX (whereas in CS it's not so common as it was) but I wouldn't be surprised if an ordinary Maths undergrad can't write decent LaTeX today, so that's a smaller and ageing constituency.
  - aragilar 3y ago
    I'm curious what input method you've found for unicode maths, most of it seems to be input via various TeX-like DSLs (e.g. mathjax), or people just take photos (or screenshots of the TeX and paste into powerpoint...)? Also, (La)TeX gives you a good-enough environment (especially with something like overleaf for sharing) for maths+crossrefs+citations that I'm not sure you can go simpler (I've tried with markdown and rst, but both end up being more of a pain, and the more maths you have, the harder it is to go without macros). Modern word remains a issue as I found out today, and most other word processors have even less support for throwing something vaguely academic together (i.e. with LaTeX I can just start dumping in content and refs and maths just work).

slikrick 3y ago

if it's not seeing security updates it's dead.