cvanelteren 2 hours ago

I hope tex gets replaced by typst. It much more pleasurable to write in in my opinion.

  • MrVandemar 2 hours ago

    It seems every article about LaTeX is a rallying call for Typst fans to inject their opinion of how amazing Typst is into a largely unrelated discussion, instead of reading and commenting on the actual article.

    • Chinjut 1 hour ago

      This is a repo for a new thing that is not identical to LaTeX, but intended as an improvement upon it. Typst seems apropos to bring up in related conversation.

yiyu_earth 1 hour ago

I do not believe that writing native LaTeX code is difficult today, given the popularity of AI-assisted coding. In comparison, using a "compiler that outputs LaTeX code" may be less stable.

  • podocarp 1 hour ago

    I used to take notes in latex. I was fast enough to do it with snippets etc. Just skip over mistakes and fix them later. So for that application I think AI assistance would still be not very useful?

    Also if you were to do assignments with latex it could be sketchy too if the class prohibits AI and you "fixed" your code with some AI help.

podocarp 1 hour ago

The problem with latex is definitely not types, not unless you're maintaining hundred line macros and defs. I think one problem is just that it's hard to represent 2d stuff in 1d. Like let's not even talk about equations, what about drawing tikz? It's like writing regex, I don't want to touch it again after I'm done.

Sometimes I rather just draw in inkscape and embed the PDF.

Also, taste. It's still kind of a wild west so you see people using the italics d for derivatives instead of the differential operator upright bold form. I guess because it's hard to type those out compared to "d". There's probably a lot more, but this is the most common. Some common whiteboard things that are just not obvious when typing in latex.

In any case it's good enough for what it is and with AI it will probably improve further, maybe I will just get it to fix all italics "d"s in the future so poor typesetting just gets fixed in post. That will probably enrage some people though :)

esafak 3 hours ago

This is the first time I've read that LaTeX's problem was a lack of types.

zetalyrae 4 hours ago

AI slop.

  • MengerSponge 1 hour ago

    You can tell it's slop because of the way that it is.

    The heading "The type system is gradual, and that is the whole design" is a dead giveaway.

    Actually the whole "How young this is" section reads very LLM-y. Claude, I think? It's funny that LLMs have more distinctive authorial voices than so many people.