The TeX tuneup of 2014 [pdf]
tug.org
tug.org
The big advantages of TeX are:
(1) The purpose of TeX was and is to lower the labor and cost of high quality document preparation of heavily mathematical material and to permit authors to prepare such documents themselves. For such work, TeX is and near the beginning long has been the very welcome, highly respected, unchallenged international standard. For people writing such documents, TeX is nearly essential. Before TeX, just the 'typing' could be more work than the work the typing was communicating. Before TeX, preparation of documents with mathematical material was grim for authors, typists, publishers, etc.
(2) The TeX software has produced almost exactly the same output from the same input on nearly any computer over decades.
(3) The software is essentially totally free of bugs.
(4) Knuth's documentation is exemplary.
In a sense, TeX is yet another word processing text markup language; the big differences are high quality output, especially of mathematical material, and the macro language.
For more, TeX was not to cut new ground in graphical arts; instead, essentially TeX looked backwards, not forwards, in that the documents were and are to be essentially just black marks on white paper much like huge examples going back 100+ years on the shelves of the research libraries. TeX was to ease the production of such documents and not to produce different documents.
So, TeX is not for just everything that can be put on paper, a screen, a cereal box, or a billboard; it is not for animated foils, animated movies, interactive user interfaces, engineering drawing, Web pages, routine text documents, routine e-mail, etc.
TeX is not for average customers of Apple or Microsoft Word or some high end graphical arts software from Adobe.
Criticisms of TeX seem mostly to be from people who don't need TeX. For people who really need TeX, the criticisms are from not very important down to irrelevant.
When I tried last time a few years ago it was not as complete as LaTeX is, atleast for me, who is much more proficient in LaTex.
You can also click somewhere in the PDF view and 'jump to source'. Used it a few times when polishing/debugging a LaTeX document, I generally don't use it for writing though. (I prefer to do all my writing in Vim).
That's an argument against using it, it seems to me. Having the words jump around as you type them is maddening.
Speaking of plain TeX:
Yes, they support UTF-8; that is, support it with a command-line switch which is a bit tricky to use. It's not like TeX can detect the encoding of your file and set things up automatically.
There's also the fact that LaTeX is often bundled in, and that is another "monstrosity" in itself. (I exclusively use plain TeX, so I have no need for that either.)
Then he hacked along for an hour or so never leaving Emacs. On every seat of the room there was a little leaflet with the MMIX instruction set which was very helpful. Donald Knuth showed us all kind of stuff you could do with MMIX and it was one of the most down to earth lectures I've ever heard.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth
redirects to
The Wayback Machine shows his homepage at that URL from 2002 onward.
TeX -at my opinion- in his mind is intended to be untouched after is death as a legacy to all software devs that will claim:
- you can do software bug free;
- you can do software that stand the test of time;
- you can do software that you can measure to be correct in regard to the problem it addresses. (Here: everlasting document typesetting).
It is the only source format/code I have from the 1996 that still compile and gives exactly the same output. And we all claim that softwares always have bugs, and must evolve. Sometimes I think we are just justifying our own lack of dedication and hard work for a perfect design that is stable and does the whole job correctly since beginning.
This software is the one that makes me realize I am fraud and every time I print something with LaTeX I wonder how broken «progress» is when all the bloatware we have fail in so many aspects where TeX succeeds.
This is actually a fantastic illustration of the gap between academic and industry concepts of computing.
Also, isn't TeX limited to the .tex -> .dvi transformation? I'm not sure the transformation from .dvi to .ps/.pdf is even part of TeX proper. And that's where the bitmapped fonts come in.
In summary, all of this may just be a fantastic illustration of the gap between Don Knuth and you.
I was about to say: "Good question. At one point everyone who had access to a computer was a programmer, as using an OS required programming skills. As that slowly phased away, considering issues which lead users into bad paths, documentation errors, and usability issues as bugs became more common."
Then I saw:
> "Do you imagine it magically became a bug on a particular date?"
and
> In summary, all of this may just be a fantastic illustration of the gap between Don Knuth and you.
Snark is unwelcome here. See http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But I thought that your first statement was questionable, and that therefore your second statement was rather facile.
> Knuth's definition of 'bug' is a limited one, that seems to be mainly about logic errors. Allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document (which very few users actually wish to do in 2014) would be considered a bug in other typesetting software.
Certainly, people sometimes use "bug" loosely, but it seems to me there is a strict sense in which a "bug" means something that was not intended by the writer of the code. And the issue you describe clearly does not fit this description.
I would call what you describe a "design flaw", at best. But as I alluded to, it wasn't even a design flaw at the time it was introduced. So it's really more of an anachronism than anything else.
And again, it's not really clear that it's even an anachronism in TeX, since it's more of an issue with the DVI-to-PS (or DVI-to-PDF) transformation.
And then you went on to conclude, from this highly questionable chain of reasoning, that this "bug" is "a fantastic illustration of the gap between academic and industry concepts of computing". Which I just find galling. Here you're talking about one of the most celebrated computer scientists of all time, someone who is almost certainly a lot smarter than you (or I), and you chalk up a difference between what you and he call a bug to the difference between industry and academia. As if Knuth is just some kind of ivory-tower crackpot who wouldn't understand the real-world exigencies of industry.
So: I think your definition of "bug" is highly questionable, and I think that in the future, when you find yourself in disagreement with some celebrated academic computer scientist, you should perhaps linger a bit longer on the possibility that you might be mistaken, rather than chalking it all up to the difference between industry and academia.
You can't handle UTF 8, the default $LANG for almost every OS it is installed on? That's a bug. It needs to be fixed.
Your output quality is poor because it uses a custom font system that pushes users towards non-scalable fonts? That's a bug. It needs to be fixed.
Something not being a flaw at a time a piece of software was introduced is also irrelevant. Unmaintained software is generally considered to be poor software. While bitmap fonts were acceptable until the mid nineties, they really aren't now.
If you still think it's just me that holds these opinions, let's test it: try and argue for the 'strict' definition of bug outside academia and see how far you get.
I didn't criticise Knuth at all. I was fairly careful not to do that, and the original moderation on the comment (+3) reflected that. I merely note that academia simply works differently from industry.
I'm aware of Knuth and his contributions. I'm sure he's a lot better at computer science than I am. That doesn't mean he can't be questioned, and you finding it 'galling' seems very much to be a case of hero worship.
"I assumed that most of HN knew that", huh? This is the same kind of tendentious nonsense as "this is a fantastic illustration of the different between industry and academia".
Not only do I _not_ know that "the non-'strict' sense of bug is the one used by almost everyone in our industry", I don't think you know it either, because I think you're mistaken. (Maybe you're in a different industry than I am.) The people I deal with (in industry) regularly make distinctions between bugs, design flaws, and possible feature enhancements. And so do most issue trackers (e.g. GitHub, JIRA), for pete's sake. So I really don't think your use of "bug" as a catchall term for all of these things is universal at all, in industry or out of it.
OT, but things can also gradually turn from features into bugs, or --what the parent probably meant-- liabilities.
Not having an presice date for when something stopped being a useful feature does not prove it still is.
To give one example where TeX hasn't evolved, and which I think is a wrong decision rather than "perfect design": its Unicode handling is atrocious. Of course, this is because Unicode didn't exist when TeX was designed. But now it does. In fact it not only exists, but is the default text encoding on most contemporary machines. My locale is set to en_US.UTF-8, for example, and I'd therefore expect my toolchain, from grep through TeX, to be able to handle UTF-8 text. But TeX chokes on it.
(Fortunately, the developers of pdfTeX aren't as averse to adding new features as Knuth is, so I've switched to that.)
I think that many good developers today, given 10 years of receiving grants, and an unchanging problem set could write high-quality, very stable, very solid code, especially with a large community providing bug reports.
To be clear, I celebrate Knuth's achievement, but I don't view it as a commentary on how software is written today.
I love how he is planning on another cleanup in 2021, when he'll be 83 years old. That's some serious dedication to your software.
Words to live by when making software. The best software doesn't concern itself with the burden to the developers; it worries about the effect on the user.
Apple's original rounded rectangle buttons is another good example.
He knows what he wants it to do, it need do nothing else, and in pursuit of that, he'll refine even the most minuscule of non-problems.
If only more developers took this approach instead of dumping out monthly bug-filled "major releases" and force-updating their users.
% This manual is copyright (C) 1984 by the American Mathematical Society.
% All rights are reserved!
% The file is distributed only for people to see its examples of TeX input,
% not for use in the preparation of books like The TeXbook.
% Permission for any other use of this file must be obtained in writing
% from the copyright holder and also from the publisher (Addison-Wesley).
\loop\iftrue
\errmessage{This manual is copyrighted and should not be TeXed}\repeat
\pausing1 \input manmac
\ifproofmode\message{Proof mode is on!}\pausing1\fi
Of course I could be wrong and he truly has quite conservative views on IP...
(It's not that the TeX tuneup inherently needs to be formatted like a publication; but that's what TeX is for, and it would be silly to expect that the TeX tuneup would not be written in TeX.)
https://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/ https://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/demo/geneve.html https://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/demo/cheat.html
What would a version of TeX reimagined by Jony Ive look like?