"""So, here the author seems to have a 'dramatic issue' to grab the reader by the heart and/or the gut. Yes, 'writers' tend to do that."""

I find this line amusing. Are you supposed to be a robot, explaining to other robots what humans do? A writer wanting to grab the readers attention is a thing that needs to be explained?

"""Of course, strictly this "issue" is 100% total nonsense: The problems he listed are all about LaTeX which strictly just is NOT the same as TeX, that is, as in:"""

And that is just a pedantic excuse, that no one cares about. People don't use TeX itself (and, to prevent another pedantic detail, I mean the vast majority of people), people use LaTeX+TeX.

"""Because the guarantee was about the output of TeX which was just a file of type DVI (which abbreviates 'device-independent file'). The TeX I continue to use as my most important word whacking software continues to put out a DVI file and appears still to meet the guarantee."""

Yeah, "walk to the Alphatype" might no be part of the architecture, but assumptions about the computing era Knuth lived in were. Which is what the writer means. Assumptions like ASCII vs Unicode. B&W vs color printing/output. Font technology. Multicore processors not being available. And tons of other relevant stuff.

"""Second, even a little reading of Knuth's book above shows that it would not be easy to be given a change in the input and then to get significant computational savings by determining what fraction of the output can be saved and not calculated again. So, we calculate all the output again."""

Who talked about "easy"? The writer talks about BETTER.

Also, several typesetting programs do just that, i.e determine the fraction of the changed output to recalculate. InDesign does not process a 100 page file again to change the style of one word in a paragraph.

"""Not due just to using TeX! However, TeX does permit writing to a file and reading from a file. So if want to use such file writing/reading to generate, say, cross references, then will need to run TeX more than once. But the effects of such writing/reading are due to the user and not to TeX. In particular, we can notice that in Knuth's book, there are no cross references that would require running TeX more than once."""

And that's relevant how? We care about how WE USE TeX/LaTeX and what WE WANT from it, not how Knuth describes it/uses it in his book. And our use includes cross-references.

"""Or, as we can see from reading Knuth's book, it is not easy to know exactly where will be the break between one page and the next. Then it will not be easy to do cross references accurate to the page number. So, in Knuth's book, he didn't."""

Again fail to see the relevance of this. Are we supposed to be content with what Knuth DIDN'T DO?

You make it sound like "page number accurate references" are outside the spirit of TeX, and we shouldn't ask for them.

Well, we want them, some of us need 'em, and it's perfectly reasonable to consider a lack of them, or the need for a two-pass phase to have them, a lack of TeX/LaTeX.

You only prove the writer's point.

"""I am sure Knuth saw this issue but wanted the high quality page breaking more than some automated cross references."""

For all your "rationality", you just keep sounding like you worship Knuth as a god that couldn't be faulted, and there can be no real problem with TeX's design.

Well, Knuth was a major academic, a damn fine algorithm scholar, and a very good programmer. Infallible? Hardly.

"""For me, I would reject that assumption. That is, absolutely, positively I do NOT want TeX to have an 'interactive interface', to be 'what you see is what you get', or to do word whacking for each of my keystrokes. I do NOT want such things."""

Good for you. Others want such things, as seen by the popularity of "see your output as you save" editors, and software such as Lyx.

Because the batch workflow suits you, doesn't mean it has to suit everyone else.

"""I would agree with the author that TeX does not bake bread, drive a car, vacuum the carpet, recognize human speech, do the calculations for computer generated scenes in movies, etc."""

Oh, got you! Here you seem to use irony to grab the reader in your favor. Yes, 'writers' tend to do that, but I wouldn't expect it from you!

"""Instead, TeX was mostly just for what Knuth said it was for, "beautiful books", especially ones with quite a lot of mathematics. Moreover, implicit was that tbe books would be essentially in English."""

Yeah. And in 2011, some of us perceive those as inefficiencies, and want a better-TeX that is not "just for books", not just for "mathematics" and not "essentially in english".

Your "but it wasn't designed that way" is NOT a counter-argument to what the writer says.