> LaTeX' modularity is its greatest power and its Achilles heel I'd say not quite, it's more the way that the entire system is built on shaky grounds, namely a

> LaTeX' modularity is its greatest power and its Achilles heel I'd say not quite, it's more the way that the entire system is built on shaky grounds, namely an insane operational model, an insane syntax, the lack of separation of concerns and the lack of namespaces. TeX could have been built on top of a predictable syntax, a transparent operational model, with a separation of styling and content and giving modules segregated namespaces, but none of that happened. When Leslie Lamport wrote LaTeX he tried to inch closer to these and other desiderata; when I built a system on top of XeLaTeX that started with a Markdown-ish/HTML-ish input syntax and compiled a XeLaTeX source text I certainly hoped I could achieve some kind of operational sanity and shield me from many of the dirty details, but in the end I gave up. Edit Ah and to address your point I believe it's not modularity per se it's just that TeX is at its very heart an environment that is actively hostile to being clean and modular, it acts like it wants very much to be a wibbly-wobbly ball of stuff.