I thought Knuth is the developer of TeX, not LaTeX… That being said, I am not overly fond of the things coming out of Stanford in that generation, like lisp, TeX, and LaTeX.
(because of anonymity, I am gonna say some bold things) These tools feels very much to me a product of west-coast PL, they feel hacky, way too flexible and end up doing nothing well, and definitely born out of the whole “hacker culture”.
Maybe Scheme and Racket is better, but I never spend the time to look into them.
I assumed LaTex is a descendant of TeX. I’m not really well informed about the history of this kind of stuff, which is why I found it interesting.
Your POV is also interesting, as I always kind of held “hacker culture,” in pretty high regard. But, now that I think about it, I see the appeal of rigorous, well studied things, built very deliberately, on strong foundations. I guess that’s why I instinctively like things like Haskell, the kind of ML with provable bounds, information theory, etc. I’ve never messed around with Lisp-like languages, but I remember my ML-focused advisor speaking of them from when symbolic-AI and self-modifying code was all the rage.
sobchak@programming.dev 6 months ago
This video gave me a background on LaTeX I didn’t know about before (didn’t know Knuth was behind it): www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc
coherent_domain@infosec.pub 6 months ago
I thought Knuth is the developer of TeX, not LaTeX… That being said, I am not overly fond of the things coming out of Stanford in that generation, like lisp, TeX, and LaTeX.
(because of anonymity, I am gonna say some bold things) These tools feels very much to me a product of west-coast PL, they feel hacky, way too flexible and end up doing nothing well, and definitely born out of the whole “hacker culture”.
Maybe Scheme and Racket is better, but I never spend the time to look into them.
sobchak@programming.dev 6 months ago
I assumed LaTex is a descendant of TeX. I’m not really well informed about the history of this kind of stuff, which is why I found it interesting.
Your POV is also interesting, as I always kind of held “hacker culture,” in pretty high regard. But, now that I think about it, I see the appeal of rigorous, well studied things, built very deliberately, on strong foundations. I guess that’s why I instinctively like things like Haskell, the kind of ML with provable bounds, information theory, etc. I’ve never messed around with Lisp-like languages, but I remember my ML-focused advisor speaking of them from when symbolic-AI and self-modifying code was all the rage.