Also can someone please write a good modern programming language for typesetting? With all due respect to Dr. Knuth, tex is awful.
TeX as a language is awful, but what it can do is wonderful. And of course everyone uses LaTeX (TeX made usable by Lamport), or at least I do, so I see little of the TeX language itself. There was nothing like it when Knuth created it, and almost forty years on, there is still nothing like it. As far as I know, the only other typesetting language that has gained even a niche is the hideous SGML, in comparison to which TeX is a thing of superlative elegance and beauty. TeX has a specialised sublanguage for mathematics, both usable for input (so far as linear text can be) and generating high-quality output, so it became the standard for document preparation in the mathematically based sciences. It’s still inferior to human typesetting, but that’s only available for final printer’s copy. What you had to do back then, well, trip down memory lane omitted for brevity.
To do better than TeX, at this point, needs a lot more than coming up with a better language to think about typesetting with. It will have to replicate the TeX ecosystem, provide two-way conversion between it and TeX, and have a visual interface. Visual interfaces for programming languages are really hard, and they generally don’t get developed beyond demos that wow audiences and then go nowhere.
And it has to be done by one person, because a committee will just create a bloated, Turing-complete mess.
Which is why it hasn’t happened. It needs someone with an expert passion for programming, technical typesetting, design, and languages considered as a medium of thought. Knuth, Jony Ive, and Dijkstra all in one. But anyone like that would have bigger things to do with their talents.
Yes, I understand all that. It is hard to move away from shitty languages once they gained market share.
But latex, while improving on many things compared to base tex is hobbled by tex as well (for example, why do I need to recompile to resolve references, haven’t we invented multipass compilation like half a century ago?) I am happy to double down on “(La)tex is a shitty language.” It’s very useful of course, but the state of typesetting today is sort of like if everyone programmed in Cobol for some reason.
What would be really nice is tablet software that can translate handwritten math into latex, and compile that into pdf.
By the way, what I think you want is not “doing symbolic math on a computer,” but “having a good input method for equations.”
edit: Also can someone please write a good modern programming language for typesetting? With all due respect to Dr. Knuth, tex is awful.
TeX as a language is awful, but what it can do is wonderful. And of course everyone uses LaTeX (TeX made usable by Lamport), or at least I do, so I see little of the TeX language itself. There was nothing like it when Knuth created it, and almost forty years on, there is still nothing like it. As far as I know, the only other typesetting language that has gained even a niche is the hideous SGML, in comparison to which TeX is a thing of superlative elegance and beauty. TeX has a specialised sublanguage for mathematics, both usable for input (so far as linear text can be) and generating high-quality output, so it became the standard for document preparation in the mathematically based sciences. It’s still inferior to human typesetting, but that’s only available for final printer’s copy. What you had to do back then, well, trip down memory lane omitted for brevity.
To do better than TeX, at this point, needs a lot more than coming up with a better language to think about typesetting with. It will have to replicate the TeX ecosystem, provide two-way conversion between it and TeX, and have a visual interface. Visual interfaces for programming languages are really hard, and they generally don’t get developed beyond demos that wow audiences and then go nowhere.
And it has to be done by one person, because a committee will just create a bloated, Turing-complete mess.
Which is why it hasn’t happened. It needs someone with an expert passion for programming, technical typesetting, design, and languages considered as a medium of thought. Knuth, Jony Ive, and Dijkstra all in one. But anyone like that would have bigger things to do with their talents.
Yes, I understand all that. It is hard to move away from shitty languages once they gained market share.
But latex, while improving on many things compared to base tex is hobbled by tex as well (for example, why do I need to recompile to resolve references, haven’t we invented multipass compilation like half a century ago?) I am happy to double down on “(La)tex is a shitty language.” It’s very useful of course, but the state of typesetting today is sort of like if everyone programmed in Cobol for some reason.
That depends on what you consider to be big. It’s not big by the standards of academia. But it might be big by the standards of real world impact.