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A comment on The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad. Parent comment

Re:The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad by nailer on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @08:37AM (#3265433)
> For whatever reason, they cannot allow applications to use the existing capabilities of the underlying OS. This goes against the Unix mindset; of course there will be unpleasant consequences, but one cannot hold Unix mindset responsible for these.

Using the native capabilities of the OS in the sense you mean - allowing TeX to use its ancient, hideous bitmap font system, goes against:

- Unix philisophy - do one thing well, link against or pipe to other apps/libraries that do their thing well

- Simplicity. The user should not be forced to make an unnecessary choice where one option is almost always superor to the other.

Knuth's concept of 'bug free' is one of an academic computer scientist. TeX has many, many issues: unnecessary dependencies, a horrible build process, and many UX issues that stopped TeX from reaching TeX's original goal of 'allowing anyone to create typeset documents'. This is fine: Knuth is a mathematically focused computer scientist from a period where everyone who had access to a computer was a programmer. It was valid in this era.

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Re:The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad by yonran on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @02:19PM (#3266930) 

  TeX's original goal of 'allowing anyone to create typeset documents'
Actually, according to this interview[1], speaking of the very first version of TeX, "I should mention that I had no idea that I was designing a typesetting system that anybody else in the world would ever use, besides me and my secretary. My idea was that I would teach Phyllis, who was my secretary for almost 20 years… So Phyllis and I were going to be the users of this TeX system. … I tried to design it just good enough to do my books and no other books."

Even with the released version, I don't think TeX was ever intended to be the last word on typesetting; it was simply his best attempt at a decent markup. He then froze the features so that previously typeset books could be corrected and reprinted using the same source. He left it up to future programs to innovate.

[1]: http://www.webofstories.com/play/17118

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Re:The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad by hyperbovine on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @11:36AM (#3266150)
You forgot my favorite TeX non-feature: completely uninformative error messages!

All kidding aside, I use (La)TeX almost every day and it's bulletproof. It's not going anywhere, so you might as well learn to love it, worts and all.

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Re:The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad by jawaddeo on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @03:33PM (#3267221)
At last someone mentioned the error reporting - the cause of so much joy during my grad student days!
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