Are mathematicians going to be using TeX in a hundred years? Two hundred? Five hundred? Two thousand?
Math is timeless. TeX may be, but it's too soon to say. It's a recent invention. It's only been around for 35 years.
Math is timeless. TeX may be, but it's too soon to say. It's a recent invention. It's only been around for 35 years.
Given that, I suspect that in one, two, five hundred years neither he nor his blog will be around. Nor anybody who read his blog. Even if his text had survived (perhaps someone goes digging though the NSA archives in a few hundred years), I'm sure that the person reading it will just intelligently substitute in the succeeding technology.
So, what I'm trying to say is that the point about TeX is just a point of practicality. It happens to be approximately true right now, and the author has no information to guide him to an alternate conclusion.
Wolfram is hammering against the interactive element with CDF and I could see TeX being extended to support a more dynamic electronic document format if HTML rendering engines continue to be typographic messes. Perhaps an LLVM-type backend to generate executable ebooks would be an interesting project, but I'm not sure I'd start with TeX except for math markup.
I would hope my prediction of the death of TikZ and PGF would come true soon enough, though.