Hacker News Reader

Comment by velcrovan | Hacker News Reader

What do you think of this post by Typst's primary contributor? https://laurmaedje.github.io/posts/layout-models/

Do you think it is sufficiently respectful of TeX/LaTeX?

As far as proponents go, I will echo the sentiments of many people who have actually used both TeX and Typst: I have been able to accomplish many things in Typst within an hour or two by writing my own Typst code, that in LaTeX I could only accomplish after several days by cargo-culting indecipherable gibberish from years-old forum posts. I freely admit Typst can't (yet) match LaTeX's long-tail package ecosystem, but it is much more pleasant to use and easier to reason about.

View on HN

I posted that link here earlier last month[0] and even I think the comment was off putting because it's off topic and just a way to put something down. "The link you posted is becoming increasingly irrelevant" doesn't seem to add much to the conversation. To the extent that it does add something (ie. comparison of typst and Tex/LaTex) it could be phrased very differently. The way it is written now also invites similarly phrased criticism the other way as seen in other replies. I agree typst is much more pleasant to write. Also yes I doubt the typst developers would call LaTex irrelevant. In fact the author specifically points out ways the Tex currently outperforms typst. (Not to imply you stated otherwise.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43032697

>in LaTeX I could only accomplish after several days by cargo-culting indecipherable gibberish from years-old forum posts To learn basic use of LaTeX, takes an afternoon. To understand the language fully takes "effortful learning" like any other programming language.

I believe the difference is that Typst is effectively a scripting language, not much different than many popular ones like Javascript and Python. If you already known the basics of some programming languages this allows you transfer them very easily and start writing your own scripts very quickly. You also don't need to fully understand the language to do this, the basics will mostly be enough.

In comparison Latex has a very particular way of doing computations that you will have to learn from scratch, and even then it won't be as easy or intuitive. The fact that Latex relies so much on packages for many things also means that you will have to learn their details and intricacies when trying to do interoperate with them, which makes this even more complex.

I'm ignorant of Typst. But you're missing an important problem with Latex. Packages are really fragile. The most important property of a programming language is compositionality, and Latex has so little of that that I'm generally afraid of picking up packages because I've wasted so many hours trying to get them to play nice.

I still use Latex because of the output quality and the sunk cost..but we can clearly do better

Reply on news.ycombinator.com