The USA is the USA and the rest of the world is the rest of the world. There are plenty of bars here where teens and children are allowed, they often come with their parents and get served toasts and juice or a smoothie, while their parents get beers.
I do quite like how clear TeX is. The curly braces make it completely unambiguous how everything is supposed to be parsed, which means even though it’s a little more awkward to write, it’s still a lot easier to write if your comments are getting more complicated. Plus it’s so much easier for the parsing libraries to get right.
I just love how universal it is. Sure, it has its flaws, but its strength is how many different applications use it. Once you know how to write TeX, you can express any equation you want clearly and understandably, as opposed to trying to write it with Unicode. Bonus points for how easy it is to add TeX rendering to the web with libraries like KaTeX (my personal favourite) or MathJax. I was able to add TeX support to my blog in 10 minutes.
I’m a bit of a sucker for TeX as might be apparent from my infodumping. If anyone’s as passionate and doesn’t know of it yet: You should try the texnique.xyz game. It’s a timed TeX typing game. I can get up to 70-80 points in it fairly consistently :D
Half of the stuff people expect to work is library code that isn’t even bundled at the default TeX context. Most of the symbols don’t even come packaged with the TeX interpreter.
Somebody should really make a “standard TeX” and LaTeX should adopt it.
Yes, universal. Many websites, apps, communicators etc. implement a flavour of TeX. They will differ in some more complex features or commands, but your $a^2+b^2=c^2$ will work. And that’s the point. For most times, you’ll just want to communicate some simple concepts.
We could do better, for sure. For example, there’s been some development around Typst, which tries to resolve many of those quirks, annoyances, and inconsistencies that come with TeX. It makes sense, since TeX evolved rather naturally and outgrew what it was initially comprised to be. While I’d love to see Typst come far, for now TeX is something that I take for granted, which perhaps better encompasses my thoughts than the word “universal”.
Huh? I know some clients fail to properly display superscript and subscript (which shouldn’t be a problem since it would be the same for my text as for the above text anyway), but I didn’t think there were any clients that would choose to render code snippets as formatted text. Anyway, here’s a screenshot of how it should look:
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