Well -- TeX is "80s good". We've gotten better at designing ergonomic software since and it really doesn't meet the modern standard. But it's good enough for most people, and sufficiently hard to replace, that it has stuck around.

Added to that, academics specifically are more willing to suffer old crufty stuff than software engineers tend to be. After all their job is to absorb fields of material whether good or bad, and the technology tends to be lagging behind the bleeding edge in many subfields anyway so TeX doesn't even necessarily stand out.

part of the challenge is the inherent irreducible complexity of the domain. "Make text look good on page" leaves lots of details unspecified.

another part is many people built their own solution to their own corner of this domain, and not all of them had the deep appreciation for how the rest of the TeX system works.

I hear similar complaints about "Make web page look good", which is popular but also a huge mess of a system.

Because Knuth wrote TeX, not LaTeX. All the parent comment's grievances are about LaTeX features, not TeX.

to be fair to knuth, he had nothing to do with latex. it's conceivable that one could start over from plain tex and build up a different high level system. (then again perhaps some of the brittleness of latex comes from unavoidable issues with the tex layer; lamport is a very respected computer scientist too!)

It’s my understanding that Knuth has little to nothing to do with latex and he himself uses tex for his books.

The dichotomy comes from conflating the TeX syntax with tex macro system, both use backslash.

The backslash based syntax allows for some really powerful typesetting which is far above anything that exists today. At the same time, the use of backslash-based langauge right to the bottom in terms of macros is what is causing the frustration.

Typst kind of solves that by having backslash based syntax implemented in Rust.

You're linking to posts from 15 and from 18 years ago. And the post from 2011 is about how Donald Knuth wrote TeX (not LaTeX) in the early 1980s. While TeX and LaTeX have fundamental design flaws, it is much less awful to use them these days, with a rich selection of rather robust packages available, that vastly reduce the need to go into hard-core LaTeX programming yourself.

I won't lie: It takes getting used to and you need to learn a lot if you want to achieve fancy complex typesetting effects. But - it's not half as inconvenient as it once was.

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