LaTeX

I have mixed opinions on it.
It Just Works™...

...but it's so inconsistent! Compare, for instance,
$\circ$ and $\diamond$
A bigger circle is \bigcirc, so what's a bigger version of \diamond? That's correct! \Diamond!
There are obviously more examples, but I ask: where's the normalisation?!

>>18
It's a fool's errand. It will be an herculean task to find each and every LaTeX command and frequently used package and force naming and ``API'' conventions, only for them to break with every uncommonly-used package and newly created one.

Then you'd have decade's worth of documentation and code samples contradicting your new conventions, and thus hordes of new users breaking them just like the old.

I'm not saying it can't be done; the Perl community got everyone to use the [code]use strict[;/code] and [code]use warnings[;/code] pragmas by way of social pressure in order to prune a bit the insanity of their language.

It'd take a new LaTeX book and sexy new packages depending on them to take the community by storm, after they are already set in place and cover a fair bit of the language, but in the end you'd still have the same old crufty and brittle language that is (La)TeX macro language underneath, with no namespaces or scopes, with fixed-size everything, and mysterious breakage with some extra whitespace in the code, with a better facade, after man-years of effort.