TeX is a joke.

I mean, it's not a joke for its intended purpose; that's fine. It typesets the #$@! out of documents. But TeX is a joke for mathematical notation in particular. Put another way: the best way to understand what an arbitrary mathematical expression in LaTeX really means, is to render it as an image and read that image. TeX can be understood best as a concise way of writing a certain class of vector images, and when you are reading TeX you are reading a computer program which generates an image.

I'm not saying it can't be used for this context, of course it can, I have used it a ton and found it quite enjoyable. The fact that it's an image-based representation makes it very easy to switch from `\int_A dx~\int_B dy~f(x,y)` to `\iint_{A\times B} dx~dy~f(x,y).` However let's not mistake the fact that TeX does not know and does not want to know how you are using the `\int` and `\iint` symbols, is 100% OK with omitting those `~` characters, and has no semantic conception of what `dx` and `dy` are. If TeX were the CAS that it doesn't claim to be, as far as it's concerned that expression could be canonically refactored to `\iint d^2fxy(x,y),` since no one wrapped the `dx` and `dy` in curly braces. TeX claims to be a typesetting and layout system, and it does that well; it's not trying to be a universal mathematical notation.

The contention of the original link posted is, all of these image-based formats like PDF and lecture videos are going away. This may or may not be true, but if it is true then TeX is not going to survive the death of images, precisely because it is a programming language for a class of images.

Maybe something else will survive. The biggest player right now is the Wolfram language, of course, but that can look terribly unwieldy too.

Very well said. I only use TeX over Word for writing math because emacs 1. makes writing it easy with macros and helper functions, and 2. is able to display the rendered visual snippets inline in the text. If I could not have the second feature, TeX would be borderline unusable, and this dependence on editors and tooling means it's not truly open. Can't envision what could be better for mathematical notation in plain text, though.

I've been using LaTeX for about 5 years now. I don't recommend picking up TeX notation for reading maths in plaintext. It's the nicest way to produce nice looking mathematics PDFs or MathJax, if you have a powerful text editor. And after a while, you learn things like "underscore is for subscript" and "^ is for superscript".

But the point is, mathematics written as a plaintext document needs an interpreter, unless you have been writing papers with math notation for some years. But it is still far more cumbersome (and looks ugly) than writing formulas by hand. And that's not exactly plaintext learning material anymore, then, even though the sources are text files (unlike Word documents).

My ideal workflow (the one I dream about) would be a document camera -like setup that parses math I write on a paper (or a blackboard) into LaTeX (or MathML) style format and ~immediately renders it as beautiful document (with MathJax or similar tool). Like Overleaf, but without typing. (And of course then I could open the source file in text editor to make edits.)

Not sure if you are aware of detexify [0], but it recognizes my trackpad-scratch quite well. The backend and all of the training data are open source, so you could indeed implement this yourself if you wanted.

I'd buy mobile app any LaTeX OCR software.

[0] http://detexify.kirelabs.org

Yes, detexify is amazing! That's probablly how I got the idea in the first place... "Imagine if detexify would automatically read all of my math writing, not symbol by symbol what I draw with mouse."

TeX is completely avoidable. I have never used it apart from at university decades ago, before I learned Word. I have done proper science jobs where papers get written but still not needed TeX. Furthermore, in all my years surfing the internet, I have never downloaded a TeX file willingly or unwittingly.

It varies by field. Try publishing in Math, CS, or Physics without using TeX.

Yeah, go teach a 60-year-old math teacher to use TeX.

I'm over 60 and have been using TeX since '85. Same manual after all these years... I still seem to be able to learn new stuff, though it's not always clear it's worth the bother.

So I'm guessing you were 28-38 when you learned TeX, rather than 60+.

If you were over 60 in 1985 and are still posting to HN, that would be really cool.

Indeed, I was 30 and my brain was still plastic. Really, the only notable thing from my post was the fact I'm still using the same Latex manual after all these years. Kinda ragged now, but still useful.

I will be 60 in a few months. I am a math[s] teacher. I have been using TeX since late 80s/early 90s when I started using small computers.

why would someone with 40+ years of math experience have such a hard time learning a new notation?

I don't think their assertion is that someone with 40+ years of math experience would have difficulty learning new notation, it's that LaTeX is composed of a lot more than straightfoward notation. LaTeX can get pretty complicated pretty quickly. While it's basic math notation is quite fantastic, it's the basic document formatting that I think would give most people trouble when learning.

Because the error messages from latex are truly awful, even just putting an underscore or less than in plain text is painful.

Assuming they have something that already works for them, lack of motivation.

Because knowledge about maths is independent of computer and programming literacy.

if we use a liberal definition of "computer and programming literacy", then it's just as much a requisite for math as it is TeX.

if we use a conservative definition of "computer and programming literacy", then it's not a requisite for either.

markup languages are not programming languages. most people have some familiarity with some markup language.

The 60 year old math professors at my faculty read and wrote LaTeX perfectly fine. One time I helped find errors in the manuscript of a book one of my professors wrote in LaTeX by himself. He was 79 years old at that time