Man, I think once you're Kernighan there should be like a 1gigabit/sec symmetric circuit wherever you go just in case you use it to do something else useful.
Besides, where would you put the bar for “distinguished”? Who would take the decision?
Which should make the problems of any such system obvious: it inevitably becomes yet another “in club” for people with connections and power.
Grand prizes with honorariums and perks of various kinds are a longstanding tradition with value.
I was mostly kidding, but: Kernighan totally can afford a big internet connection wherever he is. But he chooses not to buy it. The social benefit from him having one likely outweighs the personal benefit from him buying it.
Of course, if I still operated internet access and Kernighan was in my area, I'd definitely comp him a circuit. :P
But if you want to have every macro package that everyone everywhere likes, you're going to use some space.
There may be some technical reason why this isn't practical. Anyone know, offhand?
But the reason I don't use it is because I don't always have Internet when I need to write my document. I'd rather download all the packages and their documentation beforehand.
It’s just that the distros also include oodles of (plain text!) macro packages for everything under the sun. There are some legitimately large things such as fonts, but generally speaking a full TeXLive or MiKTeX distribution is bloat by ten thousand 100-kilobyte files, like a Python distribution with the whole of PyPI included.
If you know what you want, you can probably fit a comprehensive LaTeX workbench in under 50M, but it takes an inordinate amount of time.
> a manual source port to a different language is painful enough that nobody tried
there are in fact quite a few, many of which are complete: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/507846/are-there-any...