I have used LaTeX, TeX and ConTeX for years as my only programming language for writing beautiful docs and I think that nowadays there isn't a good alternative if you write technical documents that have math inside.

Today I use XeTeX together with the swiss-knife memoir class and a huge preamble that I have built over the years. XeTeX is modern and lets you write your docs in UTF8 with ease. I have stopped writing a lot of commands by hand cause there are a lot of modern editors out there (TeXShop on the Mac, TeXworks/TeXnicCenter on Windows, Kile and a bunch of others in Linux.)

When you enter the TeX world you cannot go back cause you start to see typographical errors everywhere: wrong kerning, missing ligatures, wrong align in formulas, wrong page dimensions and others. As Don Knuth says: "I can't go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu."

The beauty of LaTeX (XeLaTeX in this case): http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex