The TeX Pestilence (Why TeX/LaTeX Sucks) | Hacker News Reader

The TeX Pestilence (Why TeX/LaTeX Sucks)

xahlee.info

13 pointsstargrave14 comments

I can understand why the author is angry at TeX, but I think it's mainly a misunderstanding. TeX is very low-level, it was designed that way and never pretended to be anything else. That's why people created macros around it, and LaTeX is the most successful of them.

I happen to have worked on many document generation systems in my career, I have written systems targetting odt, docx, postscript, and pdf, either from scratch (for odt and docx) or xsl/fo (ps), docbook (pdf) or TeX/LaTeX (pdf).

The most satisfying, easy-to-build, but not the easiest-to-understand, the one that gave the best result in terms of time-to-develop/quality/satisfaction was TeX/LaTeX. So sure, the math can suck in TeX, maybe, I don't know (didn't feel that way at uni when I was using it for that), but as a typesettings low-level language to target, it does a very good job.

Also I fail to see how TeX is an issue, or even how it prevents competition to happen, when all it takes is writing a better front-end language for it.

> TeX is detrimental because it harbors ignorance of the structural content embodied in most math notations in most math fields. What TeX does is typesetting, as opposed to math expression encoding. In other words, what TeX does is pretty-printing.

It's like being angry at HTML because it's not a programming language.

Yeah its a weird article ... the author accuses TeX of being a typesetting language, which is what TeX advertises itself as anyway.

Xah Lee has been on of the most outstanding trolls on the internet for decades.

Look at the panache involved in telling Donald Knuth that his baby is ugly!

In addition to writing highly useful articles on a range of subjects, Xah is a character that adds great flavor to the internet, and I'm grateful for his (often wildly obnoxious) rants.

It's good to have someone remind us to review assumptions from time to time.

No, it's like being angry at 90s style HTML because it's not semantic and mixes presentation and content in a soup.

Which we should be.

TeX has one, and one only, significant problem. And that is its lack of a context-free grammar. You cannot parse it without executing it. That means you have no linting, translation, etc.

Does the author really lament that scientists do not use structured representations for publication? Did they ever try that in practice?

That's quite a rant, but I fail to see much value in his arguments? TeX was never meant to parse Math the way Mathematica or other software is?

> Free software acts as a virus. Free systems have the potency to wipe out any other protocol or design, including any superior ones (unless they are also free). A example is the various Unix systems and protocols has done huge irreversible damage to society.

The same unix systems on which the entire internet runs and he probably relies for his blog post?

"Free software acts as a virus. Free systems have the potency to wipe out any other protocol or design, including any superior ones (unless they are also free). A example is the various Unix systems and protocols has done huge irreversible damage to society.”

Wow that is a novel way to see things. Quite harsh.

I feel that the author saying LaTeX is bad because it is (in particular) not based on a GUI/point-and-click system, and preferring Microsoft Equation Editor/Outline to it, reveals a big misunderstanding.

I also don't see how Mathematica's notation is any better; I view it as way worse.

> I feel that the author saying LaTeX is bad because it is (in particular) not based on a GUI/point-and-click system, and preferring Microsoft Equation Editor/Outline to it, reveals a big misunderstanding.

He does not prefer MEE.

Quoting the article:

> TeX, being a pretty-printing system, can be considered in the same class as Microsoft Word Equation Editor. The difference lies only in their mode of operation. Specifically, TeX is by compile and batch operation like a typical computer language, and the Equation Editor is by using a mouse to click menus and buttons with graphical user interface. The heart of both as far as math notation is concerned, is doodling of a em space or en dash. All math notation's semantic structure are lost.

I don’t think asking for a graphical shell for TeX/LaTeX is unreasonable.

However, back when I was winding down my active LaTeX involvement in the late 90s, there were applications that enabled wysiwyg editing of LaTeX.

> I don’t think asking for a graphical shell for TeX/LaTeX is unreasonable.

There is one: it's called LyX [0]! You take care of content and LyX will abstract away most, if not all, TeX stuff. I've used it in the past for quite extensive documents and it is quite frictionless. It is never going to be a word processor but I believe LyX strikes the middle ground quite well. This [1] looks quite "graphic-y" to my eyes

[0] https://www.lyx.org/

[1] https://www.lyx.org/images/about/aqua.png

That was the one! Glad to hear it's still chugging along.

>I also don't see how Mathematica's notation is any better; I view it as way worse.

Besides the obvious readability improvement, it's better in that it retains the semantics of the underlying math more.

As a professional mathematician, I see it the same way a musician views musical notation. Sure, writing the name of each note on the stave would be easier to read at first, but the seemingly complex notation then allows for a much quicker understanding (see how talented pianists can sight read very complicated scores; I doubt this could be possible with a more verbose notation). Similarly, I have no trouble parsing (correctly written) LaTeX mentally.

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