Scientists use TeX for writing papers that they can submit to journals. As I already said, the journals don't accept ConTeXt. So of course mathematicians will rarely use ConTeXt.

> care about the technical level of its implementation

It's not about the implementation, it's about the interface.

Some journals accept Tex files? I’m surprised. SIAM (applied math) does not for instance. I don’t think IEEE does. Do Math journal accept tex files directly?

Arxiv does of course, most notably. But it’s not a journal.

> SIAM (applied math) does not for instance.

What? I have papers there and they insisted on latex.

https://www.siam.org/publications/journals/siam-journal-on-m...

> Authors of accepted papers must submit TeX files to SIAM for typesetting. Authors are highly encouraged to prepare their papers using SIAM's standard LaTeX 2e macros. Note that the SIAM office will format Plain TeX and AMSTeX files to LaTeX 2e. The LaTeX 2e macro package and documentation are available here or by email request.

That’s weird. I always upload PDF. And the copy editing is done on their side by editing the PDF using some fancy Adobe pro tool. I never uploaded a *.tex to SIAM. Of course I use latex to prepare the PDF.

> Some journals accept Tex files? I’m surprised. SIAM (applied math) does not for instance.

Each journal I've checked on their site (admittedly, only 4 or 5) seems to mandate TeX.

E.g. https://www.siam.org/publications/journals/siam-journal-on-a...

> Authors of accepted papers must submit TeX files to SIAM for typesetting. Authors are highly encouraged to prepare their papers using SIAM's multimedia LaTeX 2e macros. Note that the SIAM office will format Plain TeX and AMSTeX files to LaTeX 2e. The LaTeX 2e macro package and documentation are available here or by email request.

They definitively don’t mandate it. I got 4 papers there, all uploaded in PDF directly.

I loved using LaTeX for note taking back in university for technical classes since the mathematics typsetting is quite developed and clear - that said the fields a bit more crowded now with some nice alternatives for mathematical markup.

What are the alternatives?

AsciiMath and MathML - MathML is probably not a good dialect to use as a hand written notation but AsciiMath is pretty approachable.

TeX is still pretty darn good though.

AsciiMath is great! Thanks for the pointer.