Traditional, static documents will never go extinct, particularly in fields such as pure mathematics. If LaTeX3 wants to engage this crowd, it'd better offer substantial benefits, a fair amount of backward compatibility, or preferably both. In any event, LaTeX moved on from the original set of macros in 1983 to LaTeX 2.09 (anybody know when?) to LaTeX 2e in 1994... in the intervening quarter of a century LaTeX3 has been a work in progress... Maybe the goals set for the next version are too ambitious (see [1]), but clearly the inertia has been lost, a sign that the project has become fairly stable.

As with any long-term speculation, many years from now people may very well get rid of the TeX ecosystem altogether. During our lifetimes, though, I'm skeptical of seeing major changes in (pure) mathematics publishing. As unixhero pointed out, jupyter notebooks and the like will gain further adoption, and the applied math crowd, scientists and engineers will occasionally rant about having to choose between notebooks and LaTeX... c'est la vie!

[1] https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/986/43202

It is not the plaintext nature of LaTeX that limits it.

It is the stacking of macro's on top of macro's and the fact that there is no 'looking back'. Any kind of 'look back' functionality requires a second pass and the .aux file.

I think something like HTML / CSS would make a lot more sense. Essentially, we already have this atm (you have a document file, and a document type).

An alternative would be some extension of markdown with a separate file for display logic. I fear it would be hard to get that extensible enough though.

I think XML DocBook already is a better substitute for LaTeX, for most uses.

>Personally, though, my main criticism of LaTeX is that its logic is static and based in plaintext.

Literally the best feature. Universal, easy to manage with text editors, text processing tools, version control, etc. The future should be going back to this, imo.

>The future is in interactive documents (e.g., in the direction of [Wolfram's][2]), not statically compiling plaintext to image-like documents.

Jesus I hope not. Text is and forever will be the superlative format for information - images and videos can be brilliant for aiding the understanding of new ideas, but they are awful as a reference. You can search text, you can't search for images or within a video. And those are not problems to be solved - things should just simply be in text.

LaTeX is precisely good because it outputs PDFs that are relatively simple to parse and display. Any document format that doubles as code has its share of problems - how are you going to print it, how does it fare on low-power devices. Postscript can be used to solve differential equations, yet it is not used anymore..

Sure, there is a space for interactive documents, but LaTeX doesn't even try to compete there.

And honestly, I love plaintext way more that any WYSIWYG format. If proprietary Wolfram stuff is the future, then I don't like the future.

I suspect that a lot of people'll feel like you.

I still hear about people who prefer slide rules (over calculators), or derivative tables (over symbolic calculators), or steam tables (over CAD), or cameras with film (over digital), or dumb phones (over smart phones), etc.. These people just love the tools that they've known; it's part of their workflow, and they wouldn't be happy with a change even if there were some utilitarian motivation for it.

And I'm sure we can find people who'll say that the slide rule will never go away. And maybe, to some extent, they're right?

Which is to say, I don't think everyone's going to give up the old stuff. I suspect that many people will allow the world pass them by. And I don't know if they're necessarily wrong, to live the way that they want. Just how I suspect this'll play out.

I grew up in the age of electronic calculators (graduated high school in 2004), and I think all high school students today should be forced to learn with slide rules, with handheld electronic calculators banned from classroom use for students aged 5–20.

The assignments given to high school students requiring high-precision calculations that cannot be done efficiently without a handheld electronic calculator are almost universally a pedagogically worthless waste of time. Most problems would benefit from being conceptually more interesting / more involved, but using simpler numbers.

Slide rules are much better tools than handheld calculators for giving students an intuitive understanding of the relevant mathematical functions, as well as learning about place value, numerical precision, .... The students who use slide rules are getting a better education, and wasting less of their time.

For high school work, the 2–3 digits of precision provided by a slide rule are entirely adequate, and with just a bit of practice they are very fast and effective practical tools, not appreciably slower than handheld calculators for basic use.

Any computation too demanding for a slide rule (e.g. physical simulations, statistical analysis, plotting complicated mathematical functions, ...) should be typed on a full-sized keyboard in a proper programming environment.

I also think younger students (3rd–8th grade) should be working with freeform counting boards, like the ones used in Ancient Greece/Rome and medieval Europe. IMO these are better preparation for algorithmic thinking than doing arithmetic using pen and paper. (Students should continue using pen and paper; just not exclusively.)

* * *

Smart phones are definitely a double-edged sword. They offer many wonderful conveniences, but they are also extremely addictive and are in practice also doing incredible damage to people’s a ability to concentrate, do creative work, maintain healthy face-to-face social relationships, get enough sleep, etc.

That's a great point about slide rules and precision. I wish more people understood it. I am sick of seeing statistics where n < 100 reported to 4 significant figures.

Agreed. My HS aged son does well in all of his math classes but is entirely dependent on his calculator to solve any given problem. I worry he will struggle as he reaches college level math since he hasn't ever internalized what the calculator is doing. He simply plugs in the numbers and gets an answer.

> These people just love the tools that they've known; it's part of their workflow, and they wouldn't be happy with a change even if there were some utilitarian motivation for it.

This is a pretty patronising way to talk about people who use feature phones and LaTeX. Newer, more powerful tools are not necessarily better. Just look at the web technology that HN runs on!

> Just look at the web technology that HN runs on!

Honestly, I'd prefer a version of HN that had some more modern features. It's the community that makes this place worthwhile.

I sometimes wonder if the folks behind HN keep the retro style to make that point about growing a community. This is, perhaps they're trying to say that a business's value isn't just in the technology, but also in the human capital? Or not to over-engineer a product when the current solution works?

I much prefer the user experience of HN to any other web forum. Everything loads instantly, everything has a URI, there are no extraneous distractions. I think the people behind HN just share my aesthetic preferences; they're not intentionally creating something they see as substandard.

I find the modern web insufferable. Personally, I prefer the style of hacker news. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the bloated, vapid web. I like that some designer hasn’t gotten ahold of the style sheet and replaced all the content with whitespace.

It is not about the age of a tool.

LaTeX vs. WYSIWYG is more like a plain text programming language vs. a graphical one.

The more general the more complex a problem, the more likely plain text solutions win over solutions that might be more convenient in specialized cases.

It's always fascinating how people stick with LaTeX instead of the alternatives that passed LaTeX by over a decade ago. At the very least use XeLaTeX, which was "what if LaTeX, but it actually understood unicode, and the fact that maybe people want more than just English".

The future isn't LaTeX. It's the much better, native unicode, normal font using, flavours of TeX, like XeLaTeX or LuaTex.

The bigger selling point for XeLaTeX, in my opinion, was "what if a mortal could change the font?" and "if we make that easy, let's go the whole way and use OpenType files itself, not some LaTeX specific auxiliary metrics files that need to be generated".

As the original author of the ucharclasses package: absolutely.

LaTeX3[1] is quite actively developed at GitHub[2] these days. So the release is not that far as many think.

[1] https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/

[2] https://github.com/latex3/latex3

> statically compiling plaintext to image-like documents

I thought that it was common to compile LaTeX into postscript.

Agreed. The future is more within Juøyter Notebooks being shared.

You mean like cdrom replaced books? Anyhow, i usually put my math in as latex in my notebooks.

Don't know what you mean buddy. But have a look at Jupyter Notebooks

"the future is more complexity" is how we arrived to the modern web.

Could you explain that a bit?

For example, are you implying that the modern web is somehow too complex? Or/and are you implying that we should've stuck to some simpler alternative than the modern web? And if so, what might that alternative have been?

I don't mean to put words in your mouth, just trying to figure out what you meant.

The usual argument in the anti-Chrome threads, which I agree with, is that it's very hard or even impossible to create a new browser and maintain it because of how many features exist and must be supported. Even Microsoft failed.

But, I'm sorry, I have nothing to propose on how to simplify the web. And it would also be offtopic here in this thread... :-) I just believe that adding complexity is most of the time a bad idea.

Ohh that's actually a good point! And I'd liken LaTeX to Chrome in that regard. This is, like Microsoft Internet Explorer before it, people have to use it and work with it because it's the standard that everyone has -- not because it's necessarily the best.

You're right, the broader issue of ingrained standards creating cultural inertia is a big topic that's probably too much to address here.