I'm a fan of most of what Knuth has done, and in particular I love the high quality _output_ of the TeX family. But TeX's language is extremely difficult to use

I'm a fan of most of what Knuth has done, and in particular I love the high quality _output_ of the TeX family. But TeX's language is extremely difficult to use. I suspect this is true for any macro-expansion-like language. If you like deep dives, I suggest two follow-up tools for mathematical typesetting: 1. LuaTeX, which is TeX + Lua scripting support. (luatex.org) An example: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/70/what-is-a-simple-example-of-something-you-can-do-with-luatex https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/70/what-is-a-simple-... This has become my default, and I enjoy it. (I use lualatex.) 2. A friend of mine was inspired to write a modern macOS app for math typesetting. It's called MadHat: https://madhat.design/ https://madhat.design/ One of the coolest features is "no compilation," which I view as a slight exaggeration, but what's true is that it can work quickly and incrementally so you don't have a compile-and-wait cycle, even on long documents.