I can understand why the author is angry at TeX, but I think it's mainly a misunderstanding.
TeX is very low-level, it was designed that way and never pretended to be anything else. That's why people created macros around it, and LaTeX is the most successful of them.<p>I happen to have worked on many document generation systems in my career, I have written systems targetting odt, docx, postscript, and pdf, either from scratch (for odt and docx) or xsl/fo (ps), docbook (pdf) or TeX/LaTeX (pdf).<p>The most satisfying, easy-to-build, but not the easiest-to-understand, the one that gave the best result in terms of time-to-develop/quality/satisfaction was TeX/LaTeX.
So sure, the math can suck in TeX, maybe, I don't know (didn't feel that way at uni when I was using it for that), but as a typesettings low-level language to target, it does a very good job.<p>Also I fail to see how TeX is an issue, or even how it prevents competition to happen, when all it takes is writing a better front-end language for it.
> TeX is detrimental because it harbors ignorance of the structural content embodied in most math notations in most math fields. What TeX does is typesetting, as opposed to math expression encoding. In other words, what TeX does is pretty-printing.<p>It's like being angry at HTML because it's not a programming language.
TeX has one, and one only, significant problem. And that is its lack of a context-free grammar. You cannot parse it without executing it. That means you have no linting, translation, etc.<p>Does the author really lament that scientists do not use structured representations for publication? Did they ever try that in practice?
That's quite a rant, but I fail to see much value in his arguments? TeX was never meant to parse Math the way Mathematica or other software is?<p>> Free software acts as a virus. Free systems have the potency to wipe out any other protocol or design, including any superior ones (unless they are also free). A example is the various Unix systems and protocols has done huge irreversible damage to society.<p>The same unix systems on which the entire internet runs and he probably relies for his blog post?
"Free software acts as a virus. Free systems have the potency to wipe out any other protocol or design, including any superior ones (unless they are also free). A example is the various Unix systems and protocols has done huge irreversible damage to society.”<p>Wow that is a novel way to see things. Quite harsh.
I feel that the author saying LaTeX is bad because it is (in particular) not based on a GUI/point-and-click system, and preferring Microsoft Equation Editor/Outline to it, reveals a big misunderstanding.<p>I also don't see how Mathematica's notation is any better; I view it as way worse.