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Why is TeX such a mess?

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 10:52

The simplest, modern route to using TEX is to download TeX Live, but it's such a huge mess. Even the lightest installation can be hundreds of megabytes, and there are so many files it needs its own package management system.

Why can't I just download pdftex and run pdftex foo.tex and get a PDF? Why is there so much cruft for what is supposed to be ``traditional'' UNIX software?

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 11:07

TEX is not traditional UNIX software. Use troff instead.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 11:22

>>2
troff is a fucking mess.

``Micro languages'' are the worst part of the Unix philosophy.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 11:30

>>3
troff is the next best thing to handwritten postscript.
If learning troff is too hard for you, take your MS Word back to /g/.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 14:44

>>3
This is why ``Micro languages'' are bad.
Suppose you're looking to do something that's difficult with the standard Unix tools. You're not an expert in the subject, but you know enough about it to write a program. You finish it over a few days. It's full of bugs and security holes because you're the only one who uses it and you know what makes it crash. You use fixed-length buffers and bsearch an array of key-value pairs (instead of a search tree or hash table) because they're convenient to work with in C. You're making an interpreter, not an associative array library. The syntax is ugly but that doesn't matter because you designed it to be easy to parse, not to be easy to write. You never intended on it leaving your desk, so who cares? Then you see other people who want to do the same thing you did, so you give them a copy, then they give it to others, and eventually it gets included in a Unix distribution. Depending on your personality, you're either ashamed for releasing it on the world or you suddenly think you're some God-like EXPERT PROGRAMMER because your buggy code is popular. Now collect a couple hundred of these programs, even though many of them have overlapping functionality, and you have Unix.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 15:26

>>5
This is why ``Micro languages'' are bad.
I think its time we make a unified language for describing all graphical programming instead of having to learn a million different micro languages for doing such tasks. This applies to all areas of graphical interface programming such as web programming, GUI toolkits and text formatting in word processing programs. We should be using a unified hierarchical language like XML or such. We already see this happening, QT is switching to JSON, MS wants all its GUI programming done in HTML5/CSS.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 15:29

>>6

formating on paper and formatting content for a resizable screen are two completely different things.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 15:36

>>7
actually its very similar, the markup language used in Tex is very similar to html, they both describe a static layout that can be rendered dynamically

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 15:47

>>8
I guess I never thought about it that way because I use latex. The equivalence is less obvious but it is still there once you get past the macro and conditional evaluation stage.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 15:58

>>6
javascript

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 16:00

>>10
I already mentioned JSON

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 16:02

>>11
Its also worth mentioning that Douglas Crockford who designed JSON hates how HTML/CSS has turned out, it would be nice to see him on a committee to reform HTML

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 16:04

>>12
We should use S-exps instead of HTML.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 16:28

>>13
XML is S-exps

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 16:30

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 16:44

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 17:10

>>16
Looks interesting, thanks.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-22 17:33

>>13
if by sexp you mean jsexp

Name: Cudder !MhMRSATORI!fR8duoqGZdD/iE5 2012-09-23 7:46

TeX itself is actually relatively small, around 23K lines of Pascal for the basic .tex -> .dvi functionality. All the rest of the bloat is in crap that only a small subset of TeX users use or even know about, like extra fonts, packages, etc. Don't blame TeX, blame the idiots who shovel every-fucking-thing into their "TeX distro", like the same thing with Linux distros.

All you really need is TeX itself and a suitable DVI output converter. dvipdfm is relatively small and easy to use.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-23 12:59

>>19
How am I supposed to do a TeX installation then? The smallest TeX file my distro offers is texlive-core, which is around 110MB.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-23 13:29

>>20
You do know how to work a compiler don't you?

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-23 15:49

>>21
But this comes back to the problem of needing a lot of cruft or being forced to compile dependent bullshite yourself.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-23 16:13

>>22
Don't use niggerbuntu.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-23 16:39

>>19
TeX itself is actually relatively small, around 23K lines of Pascal for the basic .tex -> .dvi functionality. All the rest of the bloat is in crap that only a small subset of TeX users use or even know about
nobody uses Tex, the La part of Latex was developed by Leslie Lamport is the actual markup syntax that everyone uses to make documents

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-23 18:48

>>22
What cruft? If you're talking about the compiler and sources, shut the fuck up and get the fuck out. I have invented a new kind of computer. It doesn't have a compiler. I call it ``television.''

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-23 19:30

>>24
TeX is the language, nerd. LaTeX is just a set of macros for plebs who can't be bothered to read The TeXbook

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-23 19:32

>>24
Leslie Lamport should have called it LeTeX.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-23 19:33

TeX a shit.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-23 19:35

>>27
upboats

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-23 23:58

Why are you idiots not just using troff?

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-24 3:59

>>30
because Latex is better, because we need a standard/universal notation for document markup and Latex wins by a landslide

Name: Cudder !MhMRSATORI!fR8duoqGZdD/iE5 2012-09-24 4:45

>>22
TeX itself has no dependency on anything other than standard Pascal. Knuth explicitly designed it like that, which is why it has its own memory allocator, etc.

>>24 see >>26
And if you really want LaTeX then include this at the top of your source files or dump it into a .fmt for preloading:
http://www.tex.ac.uk/CTAN/macros/latex/unpacked/latex.ltx
(See also http://my.opera.com/Michael-Dodl/blog/2011/06/24/latex-disabling-the-5-year-time-bomb and http://preney.ca/paul/archives/198 to remove a bit of WTF-ness.)

>>30
trollololololoff

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-24 5:08

>>32
I used groff for all of my 2nd year assignments. Suck it!

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-24 7:31

>>32
TeX itself has no dependency on anything other than standard Pascal.
which is the problem, Tex takes too long to compile so it cant be used in a wysiwyg editor. Tex should be incrementally compiled in an interpreted language. Anyone know what Open Office is programmed in?

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-24 7:33

>>34
both LibreOffice and OpenOffice are written in Sepples and Java.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-24 7:42

>>34
Look up LyX, Gummi and Kile

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-24 10:51

>>34
What a stupid criticism. It's a compiled format. That's the point.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-24 11:59

>>34
Tex should be incrementally compiled in an interpreted language.
Call it ``TeXcrement''.

Name: Cudder !MhMRSATORI!fR8duoqGZdD/iE5 2012-09-25 5:40

Tex takes too long to compile
How old is the machine you're trying to use it on?

On a system from the 80s, it would've probably taken a few minutes. Today we've gotten around 3 orders of magnitude faster so less than a second is about right. It's only 23kLOC.

Name: Anonymous 2012-09-25 6:10

so less than a second is about right. It's only 23kLOC.
there is no way you are going to compile 23kLoC in less than a second on any computer. I have about 5 seconds for just a 100 lines

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