Okay, just for

dextorious

and

jakobe

and starting with my

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3334504

I'll try again:

(1) Issue 1.

In that issue, the author had:

"It’s comforting to think that all the TeX documents I’ve written over the years will still be readable a century hence. But Mind Two reminds me that in practice I have trouble maintaining TeX documents even for a few months, much less decades or centuries."

but here his concern is NOT about "TeX documents" but about LaTeX documents.

They are not the same.

(2) From dextorious.

About Issue 1, dextorious wrote:

"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."

No. The claim:

"People don't use TeX itself".

is false: I use TeX itself, a lot; I'm a Ph.D. applied mathematician and, thus, use TeX for math. In fact, for math, I know of no reasonable substitute except for LaTeX which I don't like as well as just TeX.

Then, since I have TeX and know how to use it, it is also my main high quality word whacking software; I use it for letters, technical papers, foils, and even business cards. I essentially never use LaTeX. And I have a version of Word and nearly never use it either. E.g., even for just simple letters, I much prefer TeX to Word.

That I actually use TeX itself is not "another pedantic detail" because one of the main reasons I won't use LaTeX is JUST the objection of the author that LaTeX is not stable: I want the stability of TeX. E.g., I have over 100 macros in TeX. Nearly all of these were written in the 1990s. When I changed to Windows XP, I copied over all my TeX macros, and all of them have continued to work just as before just as Knuth guaranteed. GOOD.

(3) TeX Doesn't Slice Bread.

There is no one tool that can do everything, and it would be foolish to hope for such a tool.

Knuth was extraordinarily careful about saying just what TeX was, providing some exemplary documentation, and then essentially freezing everything for all time.

The author criticizes TeX for not being what the author wants. This is not fair or even reasonable.

It would be fair to criticize TeX for failing to do what Knuth promised. But it's not fair to criticize TeX for not being something it was not intended or promised to be.

It's not fair or even reasonable to criticize a Stradivarius violin because it is not a Steinway piano, French food because it is not Chinese food, a car because it is not a truck, etc.

As software goes, LaTeX is relatively stable, but the author criticizes LaTeX on stability. So, (A), the author wants stability, more than LaTeX has. But, (B) the author wants more in user interface and likely languages, alphabets, fonts, color, cross references, maybe rotations and other transformations, likely spell checking and hyphenation in many languages, graphics, maybe with sound and video, etc. And we have to assume the author also wants the ability to do well setting math. Then in practice (A) and (B) conflict: That is, trying to provide the much greater functionality of (B) will mean years and years of revisions that conflict with the stability of (A).

Well, I have good news for the author: It's been a secret and ABSOLUTELY not to be distributed beyond this thread. So far known by no more than a very few people, the UN has funded, starting some years ago, a unique software development effort in a monastery in Tibet to develop UniTeX, word whacking software that will handle all of the Unicode alphabets and their languages with spell checking and hyphenation along with 48 bit color, 3D, resolution from 600 pixels per line to tens of thousands, execution on super computers down to cloud servers, desktops, laptops, palmtops, tablets, mobile phones, wrist watches, and magic decoder rings, many thousands of fonts, Haskell, for at least 1000 cores, as the macro language, all of the functionality of Distiller, PhotoShop, Final Cut Pro, and AutoCad, output on paper, PDF, AVI, Flash, SilverLight, and MP3, and much more. Version 1.0 will be released when all the functionality has been implemented and is at least as stable as TeX. Then version 1.0 will be the last version. The project will be open source, but the name UniTeX will be reserved for the one, only, genuine, guaranteed authentic, dyed in the wool, UN UniTeX. The release date for version 1.0 is currently set at year 2100.

In the meanwhile, TeX is what it was intended to be. I believe that TeX, just as it is, is terrific for all my higher quality word whacking.

The main target audience for TeX is writers of the most serious work in subjects with a lot of mathematical notation in math, science, engineering, and technology. For such writing, TeX remains quite good. E.g., the emphasis on English, black and white for the fonts, the prominence of the TeX Computer Modern fonts and the AMS fonts, the stability, etc. are all reasonably appropriate. In particular, it will not be easy to get the relevant academic journals to give up TeX in order to get a lot more in color, fonts, alphabets, etc.

Information technology entrepreneurship is a very active field, especially in Silicon Valley. So, someone who wants more than TeX could do a startup. My view is that getting a good combination of product stability, product functionality, product development cost and time, user adoption, and revenue with the good features of TeX and much more, that is, getting what the author wants, would not be promising. Or, Knuth worked hard on TeX for what, over 10 years; doing a lot more would take much more, would take too darned much.

Finally, there is another point about TeX: Before TeX, getting math typed was just GRIM. Typically the typing was much more difficult than the math. TeX made it quite reasonable to get math typed. GREAT.

TeX is so good that now the challenge is the math and not the typing.

For the main intended users and uses of TeX, e.g., Knuth and his writing, TeX is fine, and changing to something else just is not worth the effort.

In particular, Unicode, color, a graphical user interface (GUI), etc. are from not worth the bother down to very much not welcome.

Net, there was a big problem. TeX provided an excellent solution to the problem. The problem has not much changed and remains solved. Done.