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Comment by mhh__ | Hacker News Reader

I don't think LaTeX is that bad but...

As a community (programming, engineering, science - whatever) we should probably be louder that the one thing any man or woman with the raw cash can do to help the scientific community is funding LaTeX-2030. The problem is oh-so-difficult but having a modern statically typed (for reflection mainly) well-designed programming language for typesetting could save huge amounts of time for researchers and the like.

That and the real agenda which is to kill word.

The degrees of separation from the HN readers stereotype of a HN reader to a billionaire can't be that high, right?

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I don't really believe this. Fund some open access initiatives or something and your money will go a lot further.

The vast majority just don't have a use case where "LaTeX-2030" is going to help, and this wouldn't make much difference to them. I'm a mathematician and I write papers in LaTeX every day. Sure I could benefit from programability occasionally, but it's just not a serious problem. If I need to automatically generate a table or something, I have a Python script output LaTeX, it takes me 30 seconds.

Obviously there are some uses cases where it would make a big difference, but there just aren't very many in the grand scheme. We already have LaTeX3 which lets you do scripting, and lualatex. The fact that basically nobody uses either gives you a sense of how much the general community wants this.

LaTeX indeed mostly works. But, I do think it could be a lot better. For example, today while writing a paper, I ran into a compilation issue that gave me the following error message:

  ! Undefined control sequence.
  <write> ...\protect \numberline {\plist@algorithm
                      1}{\ignorespaces $\protect...
  l.350 \end{theorem}

None of these commands (except \end{theorem}) were in my paper, they were all in an included package. I later found out the issue was nowhere near line 350 or inside of the theorem environment. There just doesn't seem to be a good way to debug LaTeX errors. The best method I found was to use some sort of binary search, removing parts of the document to see if the error persists — which is ridiculously time consuming.

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/309010/teach-me-to-d...

An initiative doesn't fit the "one thing" criteria of my comment

"LaTeX-2030" is shadowed in search engine results by hits for rubber gloves. Can you share a project link, if there is one?

Perhaps: https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/ ?

Probably not, that project seems to have been started in 1999, based on the date from the pdf linked in the second sentence

I've never heard of "LaTeX-2030", and even adding terms like "typesetting" and "language" to filter out the gloves (and other less SFW results...), I still don't find anything relevant. Whatever it is, I guess they must really need the funding if they can't even make it onto the front page of Google.

I think they meant a hypothetical replacement for LaTeX that would come into existence as a result of that funding and would be ready by 2030, rather than a project that actually exists now.

Just as there are various levels of LaTeX mastery, there are various levels of English literacy.

Is that aimed at the grandparent commenter (mhh__) for an insufficiently clear comment, or the parent commenter (pklausler) for not reading it correctly? I found the original comment perfectly clear but evidently several others didn't, so it really could mean either. I can't help, though, pointing out the irony that your comment is ambiguous. Maybe the problem isn't literacy but just that language is hard.

Ordinarily one would say that one who understands {less, more} is {less, more} literate. The base case is Babel: complete mutual incomprehension, like unto that of the beasts. Any who leave this state, in no matter which direction they leave, have read and understood. So, I can't in good conscience answer your question. Language is just exactly what we make of it.

Irony, on the other hand, is a single message for multiple audiences. It requires a degree of mutual incomprehension.

I close to giving up on trying to be clever or poetic on HN, I think the implicit no jokes or fun rule means people just switch their brains off and I end up having to explain it (This particular comment not so much, but still)

Bingo

Did you mean LaTeX 3? https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/

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