TeX must die

Someone asked me on HN why I hated TeX. I thought my response deserved an article of its own.

Bottom line: TeX is a leftover from the 1980s. In the 1980s it was probably quite good. So was the Commodore 64, but you wouldn’t write your thesis on it in 2020, would you?

It’s a mess of multiple command line tools which run each other. None of which I understand or want to learn. tex, xetex, latex, xelatex, biblatex, texi2dvi, latexmk… What? Why must I care about this? Who’s in charge here?

Its error messages might be useful if you were running them by hand in 1985, instead of via 5 other tools. Literally these messages say things like “just type x now to continue”, as if I’m doing this manually. But I am not, for I desire to use a computer in order to automate mundane tasks.

It’s a mess of multiple packages which redefine each others’ macros. Namespacing? Ha ha ha. Look at this garbage: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/420448/error-illegal...

It gets in the way. If I open my article in a text editor, I want to see the title, author, abstract and first paragraph. Not 100 lines of backslashed computer blah. If I want to insert a picture, I don’t want to have to copy-paste a paragraph of code:

\begin{figure}
  \centering 
  \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{boat.jpg}
\end{figure}

It’s ugly. I don’t want to see backslashes everywhere. I don’t want to write `` to open quotation marks. I don’t want to write \’e for é. When I write English prose, I want to look at nice English prose — not something that compiles to it.

Its model is that the markup specifies semantics, not syntax or typesetting. So you write e.g. \emph{} to emphasize something. This is bullshit. There are 100 reasons to use, say, italics: emphasis, foreign language, technical terms, etc. etc. Are we going to have a keyword for each of those? No. Just let me use italics. (Of course, they have that as well. Congratulations, you timewasters.)

Its maths notation sucks.

Its culture is toxically up its own posterior, starting with the name. Oh, it’s pronounced techhhh? Thank you for enlightening me, neccccchbeard. And if I have to read one more time “don’t use vertical lines in tables, just use booktabs” in response to a question about HOW TO USE VERTICAL LINES IN TABLES. Screw you, 80s hippie, I know what I’m doing and you don’t.

The same toxic culture has infected academia. One idiot reviewer told me, as a supposedly legitimate critique of my work: “this wasn’t written in TeX”. PhD students are forced to learn it. They spend nights crying and trying to make their tables work. Then they get Stockholm syndrome, become vastly proud that they know to write \ldots for …, and pass the filthy disease on to their own students. Meanwhile they could have learned an actual programming language.

tl:dr; Use Markdown. Use HTML. Use Microsoft Word. Hell, use RTF. Don’t use TeX. Don’t let your friends use TeX. Stop the madness now. Say No.