RE: https://fedi.kbg.sh/@kevin/117492212328430426
I’m torn on this. On one hand. TeX *itself* is a beautifully crafted and well-documented piece of software.
But, once you layer LaTeX and a pile of random CTAN packages on top, some problems become apparent:
- poor error messages
- slow compile times
- packages that must be loaded in a certain order, or can’t be used together at all in one document, etc
I’ve never used Typst so I cannot compare, but I think TeX ought to be replaced at some point. It has served us well, but at this point it’s more than 40 years old. Which in itself makes it an incredible achievement of course!
Before people go all in on Typst, I’d like them to consider the wisdom of replacing TeX, software that is:
- Absolutely finished
- Essentially bug free
- Written in a simple, highly portable language
- Extremely general
- Backwards compatible with decades old code
…with a commercial product that relies on an enormous tangled web of dependencies amounting to millions of lines of code for something which is far less general than that which it replaces
If you’re a corporate programmer, TeX is worth studying closely because it is like something from another dimension:
- you can take a math paper written in the 80s, typeset it today, and get identical output. Try that with a random C or C++ program and Clang
- the TeXbook is one of the best manuals for any piece of software ever. Compare that to your README.md
- a second book “TeX: the program” lays out the entire source code side by side with detailed explanations and cross references. Note that all of the code *fits* in a single book. Compare that to your million-line codebase with no comments that nobody understands