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Comment by fanpu | Hacker News Reader

Great question! Is there a specific domain/example that you have in mind? I don't think people intentionally use archaic language if their goal is to educate and enlighten, but in papers it is quite common for unnecessary jargon to be peppered in, which while probably obvious to the author, makes it hard for people new to the field to break in.

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Realized I misunderstood your question. IMO the main design problem with LaTeX from a usage-standpoint is that there are too many ways of achieving the same thing, and oftentimes none of them is a clear winner. It's still the best option for a usable, programmable typesetting language that we have (i.e writing for-loops to draw structured graphs in TikZ...)

My personal beef with LaTeX, other than the utterly atrocious syntax, is that it a.) endlessly barfs on your terminal during its normal operation and b.) does not respond to normal terminal interaction upon an error (wth is it expecting? I interactively edit and correct mistakes!?). So it's scroll blindness and flailing all the way, a kludgy, rickety mess. Not to mention its utter mess of a package management system.

For the terminal output issue, consider latexrun https://github.com/aclements/latexrun

It should be noted that TeX wa s of course designed to actually be interactive and stop letting you fix errors.

I went through the texbook by Knuth last year and my eyes were opened (also note that I am an incurable (La)TeX fan so my opinion is biased)

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