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Comment by techwizrd | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about other math departments, but most of the students and professors I knew during my math degree knew LaTeX.

From my cursory glance over the page, this isn't much simpler than LaTeX and it mostly just reduces a number of backslashes. It doesn't save me much time when typesetting equations. Nowadays, I mostly type LaTeX for MathJax or Jupyter notebook. Adding asciimath to Jupyter seems to be on the backlog[0], and it's dependent on CommonMark coming up with an extension system.

0: https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/1918

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Notice the subtlety. The first example on the site is:

sum_(i=1)^n i^3=((n(n+1))/2)^2

To render this in LateX as it is shown would be

\sum_{i = 0}^n i^3 = \bigg( \frac{n(n+1)}{2} \bigg)^2

No fracts, just "/", no parenthesis enlarging with "\bigg", no slashes or brackets.

Looks pretty nice :-)

None of those things are difficult. And don't say 'no slashes or brackets'. Swapping `\sum_{..}` for `sum_(..)` isn't reducing the number of brackets, and in fact I find the top harder to read as it has more of just one type of bracket.

>None of those things are difficult.

But all of these things distract from the main task.

And you also have to learn LaTeX, which many might not care for.

Well if your work involves typing equations it's implied that you understand LaTeX.

If you work involves rare occasions of having to type equations, it doesn't.

Nobody's work involves that.

One may use \left( and \right) to get automatically-sized brackets.

What's more, you can use a package like \usepackage{physics} which includes several convenience macros like \qty( [...] ) as a shorthand to \left( [...] \right). To go yet another step further, define something like \newcommand{\p}{\qty} to shorten the notation to simply dropping a \p before your delimiters to autosize them.

Looks like it does some more parsing than LaTeX; in the example you don't need to type \frac and \left(\right).

But to produce high-quality renderings of mathematical formulas, you need this fine-grained level of control. Not all fractions should use "\frac", sometimes "\tfrac" (which produces a vertically smaller fraction) or even an in-line "/" are more appropriate.

Similarly, "\left(" and "\right)" sometimes result in parentheses whose size don't reflect stress and emphasis. In those cases, it's good to have "\bigl(" and friends available.

LaTeX has several flaws. But it's also astonishingly good, making it extremely hard for a competitor to catch on. We're kind of locked in to LaTeX.

Also, AMS LaTeX, by its nature, allows you to write custom macros to shorten the particular notation(s) you happen to use most. A lot of these comparisons fail to note that important fact about the use of the tool.

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