
TNT Is Not TeX - wglb
http://bit-player.org/2011/tnt-is-not-tex
======
mcav
I like the broader question this inspires: _Why_ are the technologies
prevalent in the 60's still prominent today? The correct, standard answer is
that they're good enough. Good enough often beats out better solutions. But
that's only half of the story. Embrace that theory too much, and we'll find
ourselves in a world of good enough solutions.

I don't know about you, but I don't want the world to be "good enough". I want
it to be _better_. We could accept all of what we have today, and take it for
granted, and we'd live with it forever. But that would suck.

Even the most entrenched technologies can be displaced, or even replaced, with
enough ingenuity, effort, and a superior technology. Most changes are
happening slowly, as they must when we have billions of "installs". Most won't
replace their predecessor completely, but erode it slowly:

IPv4 to IPv6.

Windows to OS X.

SOAP to REST.

XML to JSON.

HTTP to SPDY.

IE to Chrome.

Flash to Canvas.

Those changes didn't happen automatically; people pushed to get those new
ideas out there. Truly better software will make it, but it won't happen if
you accept that the old guard is here forever.

Forever is a long time.

One more thing: Many things that are _really_ old — Unix, for instance —
aren't the same as they were before. They've evolved, changed, and grown as
developers evolve the software. Emacs today is tremendously different from its
first release. Software evolves, and often dies when it doesn't.

~~~
darklajid
I do wonder how

Windows to OS X.

made it on that otherwise agreeable list.

~~~
dextorious
What do you mean? OS X is a POSIX-certified UNIX, with a damn fine UI, and
tons of both proprietary and OSS for it.

I can understand people liking Linux/Solaris etc more, but are there people
that really believe Windows is better?

~~~
darklajid
Yes.

It confuses the hell out of me that I'm defending Windows here - I'm an OSS
enthusiast and run Linux whenever I can.

Thing is: Operating systems are at this point just a more complex choice of
preference and taste. Pick anything recent (I'm not going to stand for Win
95/98/ME/XP), use common sense and best practices for the platform and you're
golden.

No, OS X is not by default a better system. It might attract you as a BSD with
a UI that you consider damn fine. Other people are free to disagree and like
their choice of platform better, be it Windows, Linux, *BSD or whatnot.

I repeat: There's _zero_ ground for calling OS X generally superior (nor
inferior!) in a war of operating systems, neither technically nor in any other
way.

------
pavpanchekha
Unix is still the same (in some ways) as before because Unix had a remarkably
simple mental model, and the ways we try to replace them don't. Unix didn't
last forever because it had features, good god! No, it's because it was so
robust and flexible as to serve even a modern system. TeX, and Unix, and all
these things, were hackable. (If you don't agree about TeX, read the TeXbook
and some traditional TeX, not this LaTeX crap that's grown around it.) That
doesn't mean it these systems are irreplaceable. (Hell, I'm working on a
project to replace the Unix shell...) It just means you need to put more
effort into devising a very good mental model. Something that actually
captures all of the variation you want. So, don't replace TeX because you
don't like TeX. Replace TeX because you have something better, something
obviously better, something that you could explain to a five-year-old.

~~~
Thrymr
Strongly agree. The big problem is not TeX, it is LaTeX. We need a better
layer on top of TeX that can reset all the LaTeX cruft.

------
jimwise
This would seem a problem that could be solved by a cloudish sort of solution,
though -- have an iPad app which hands actual typesetting of a document off to
a server somewhere, sending TeX sources, and receiving a PDF in return.

A simple starter implementation might require your TeX to be a single file,
and could just run TeX in a mostly-readonly chroot jail (bearing in mind that
TeX can shell out, read/write arbitrary files readable by the executing user,
and so on), and serve up a PDF, all wrapped in a web service of some sort.

This wouldn't be terribly fast, but given TeX's performance, the actual
typesetting is likely to be the bulk of the time spent, even considering the
round trip.

------
HilbertSpace
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.

------
HilbertSpace
The article has several issues of 'drama' regarding TeX. All of these issues
are just contrived to have drama for the sake of drama; none of these issues
is a serious comment about TeX.

I discuss six such issues:

Issue 1.

The article has:

"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. What about those presentations done with the foils
class that stopped working after an upgrade and that I’ve never bothered to
fix? Or the articles using the pstricks package that won’t compile under
pdflatex? TeX itself may be a fixed point in the software universe, but
everything else spins dizzily around it."

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.

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:

Donald E. Knuth, 'The TeX book', ISBN 0-201-13448-9, Addison-Wesley, Reading,
Massachusetts, 1990.

with the macros there called Plain.

Or LaTeX is as in, say,

Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly, 'Guide to LaTeX, Fourth Edition', ISBN
0-321-17385-6, Addison-Wesley, Boston, 2004.

and

Frank Mittlebach and Michel Goosens with Johannes Braams, David Carlisle, and
Chris Rowley, with contributions by Christine Detig and Joachim Schrod, 'The
LaTeX Companion, Second Edition', ISBN 0-201-36299-6, Pearson Education,
Boston, 2004.

and in these two books we do not see Knuth's name.

So, can't blane the problems of LaTeX on Knuth or TeX.

So, his:

"It’s comforting to think that all the TeX documents I’ve written over the
years will still be readable a century hence."

Good. So, with TeX, just TeX, that is, just Knuth's TeX itself and not LaTeX,
FakeTeX, JunkTeX, or NotTeX, the author of the article of this thread can
remain comforted.

Issue 2.

Yes, the 'writer' seems to like drama more than rationality since he also has:

"The skeptical Mind Two has another argument as well: Under Knuth’s edict it’s
not just the TeX markup language that can’t change; it’s also the architecture
of the system. Knuth created his flawless soufflés and dæmon diarrhœa at an
ASCII terminal wired to a PDP-10, and the only way he could see the product of
his labors was to walk down the hall and retrieve hard copy from the AlphaType
machine."

But the "architecture of the system" has nothing to do with "walk down the
hall and retrieve hard copy from the AlphaType machine". Instead, part of the
"architecture" is the guarantee:

"His intent in freezing TeX is to ensure that the same input should always
yield the same output."

and that guarantee continues to hold without a "hall" or "AlphaType" machine.
How? 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.

Issue 3.

The author goes on with

"But the core programs still run in batch mode, as they did in the Dark Ages.
To make even the smallest change in a document, you still need to throw away
all the existing output and run a whole file (or set of files) through the
compiler tool chain."

Of course. He should expect something else? I have two responses:

First, what's wrong with "batch mode"? What else is to be done? As any Web
site designer knows, due heavily to the 'sessionless' model of the Web, the
server code for a Web page in HTML and CSS (but not necessarily Ajax) runs
essentially in 'batch mode'.

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.

Issue 4.

Next, the author has:

"Sometimes you have to do it twice."

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.

Or, as we can see from reading Knuth's book, it is not easy to know exactly
where will be the break betwoen 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.

Sure, in my usage of TeX, I have some macros for cross references to the page
number, but my macros can occasionally make a mistake and, thus, are not up to
the quality of TeX.

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

Issue 5.

The article has:

"By then we’ll just throw Moore’s Law at it: Automatically rerun TeX n times
for every keystroke in the editor."

Here the author is implicitly assuming that, of course, a word whacking system
SHOULD be based on an 'interactive interface' with 'what you see is what you
get', one keystroke at a time. That's a very specific assumption that would be
quite questionable at any time and otherwise would tend to 'date' TeX.

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.

In particular, I want to be able to run TeX in a 'batch script' with, "Look,
Ma, no hands.". That is, I want TeX to remain something that can do its work
without my being there, that is, part of the future where computers do work
without a human giving full attention at each keystroke.

In particular, a good response to 'what you see is what you get' (WYSIWYG) is
that with such an 'interactive interface' 'what you see is all you've got' and
that's not very much.

What can there be that is not seen? Sure, can have a 'conception' for the
document and parts of it and have some macros that contribute to this
conception. Or, the macros automate parts of the conception. E.g., want a
macro for the page headers. Then all the page headers look as in the
conception for the page headers. Strictly with WYSIWYG, would have to type in
the header for each page individually and, then, struggle to get them all as
in the conception. Similarly for how to number sections, subsections, figures,
tables, and equations and much, much more.

Issue 6.

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.

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. E.g., the hyphenation was
for English, and no fonts were provided for text in Cryllic, Fraktur, Arabic,
etc. In particular, the characters were to be from 7 bit ASCII and not 8 bit
whatever or Unicode.

Consider his "books": TeX was looking backwards in time, that is, was intended
to be a computer version of traditional, beautiful typesetting for BOOKS, just
such BOOKS, and not something different, better, for the future, etc.

Knuth didn't say 'beautiful PDF files', 'beautiful Web pages', or 'striking
foils with voice over, background music, and multi-touch gesture recognition',
etc.

So, there is a lot that TeX is not. Right.

There's no 'drama' in saying that TeX won't sweep floors, and the article has
nothing that says that TeX fails in any of its promises or guarantees.

In particular, the article's 'failures' of TeX are for, say, LaTeX or
something contrived about some printer down the hall.

There is more on what TeX is and is not in

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2327490>

~~~
dextorious
"""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.

~~~
akuchling
I think Knuth originally envisioned a writer working with a book designer/TeX
developer to build a new set of macros for each project, and once the book was
written the macros would be left alone. Therefore it would be very important
to avoid breaking old macros, meaning TeX's behaviour needed to be nailed
down. Today we would more likely take a PDF-like approach, specifying the file
formats and using multiple programs to generate and process them.

