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0 points_emacsomancer_7y ago0 comments

TeX itself is Turing-complete, if not exactly an ideal language for computing things not directly related to typography.

But Lua(La)TeX exists, which allows for more user-friendly scripting in Lua (not my favourite language, but...), and I think that is the only real 'competitor' of (La)TeX.

I love Lisp, but the majority of what I write is in (La)TeX, and I don't know of anything comparable for dealing with creating and typesetting academic-type work. Most of its 'competitors' use TeX on the back-ends, and though I've tried writing more in Org mode and exporting to LaTeX, in the end for anything beyond trivial text, it's easier just to write directly in LaTeX.

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Ambrevar7y ago· 2 in thread

All this is definitely true, but in my opinion not ideal. LuaTeX adds a significant layer of complexity to an already way-too-complex system.

At this point we might want to step back and wonder why this has become so hard.

TeX is a poor foundation to build upon, so I don't think LuaTeX, despite being the best solution currently, is the right direction to explore.

_emacsomancer_OP7y ago

> TeX is a poor foundation to build upon

I still disagree with this characterisation. TeX is a really beautiful solution to a non-trivial problem, and its implementation in WEB is really quite interesting. LaTeX adds quite a lot of complexity and messiness, but does also add very useful functionality and abstraction away from low-level typesetting. Org-mode and similar 'mark-up' languages are very nice in more rigidly-defined domains, but they don't have the power of (La)TeX for academic writing. I don't see any real 'competitors' to (La)TeX that aren't themselves just adding layers on top of TeX (for better or worse). TeX is nearly as old as (original) Emacs and has similarly become complex in perhaps not-entirely-ideal ways, but - like Emacs - there's no substitute.

Ambrevar7y ago

I'm not criticizing the power of TeX in terms of typesetting, I'm only referring to the _language_ here. (And you are aboslutely right, Org and other markup languages are not competing with TeX.)

Imaging the capabilities of TeX with a good programming language.

I don't find WEB beautiful. In my opinion, literate programming (at least in this case) is a pretext to hide a terrible, unexpressive programming language.

As you're saying, Emacs had the good taste to use a Lisp back in those days, so it really is a pity that TeX didn't.

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