I think TeX in particular somewhat suffers from being written in a language few people know (a Pascal variant Knuth invented) and to 70s architectural standards

I think TeX in particular somewhat suffers from being written in a language few people know (a Pascal variant Knuth invented) and to 70s architectural standards (fixed buffers for everything, etc.). Better recent examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5998580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5998580 http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskore http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskore and just about anything in http://coffeescript.org/#literate http://coffeescript.org/#literate