What TeX gets right: flexible macros. Sometimes you really do need more control than most languages offer. A combination of XML documents with custom XSLT is pr

What TeX gets right: flexible macros. Sometimes you really do need more control than most languages offer. A combination of XML documents with custom XSLT is probably the best alternative, but XML syntax is horrible to write. What TeX gets wrong: flexible macros. There's a very good reason we shy away from "cannot be parsed, only executed" when designing a language these days. There's also the major issue of namespacing. It's quite reminiscent of the Curse of Lisp, except somehow worse.