Latex sucks

Yeah, once again, a rant about Latex.

I did go through a TeX period, before I got less stupid.  LaTeX sucks. 190MB of core documentation?  15MB of "recommended" documentation? What a bloated piece of crap.  I will be happy when LaTeX is finally forgotten and buried, and people move on.

And, no: TeX does not give you anything that you can't get, cheaper, elsewhere.  Lout does the same thing, with better quality, in about 2MB.  Why?  Because it doesn't suck.  It's well designed, unlike TeX.

LaTeX had it's place in history.  It filled a niche; but come on, people.  Stop building software systems around crappy legacy software (I'm looking at you, asciidoc).  It's bloated and unnecessary.  It suffers from Java-itis.  Christ, any software software that takes up more space than a core operating system for a base install should always smell bad to intelligent designers.  Just because the people who end up using TeX are often highly educated people (in other fields than software engineering), TeX has gained this patina of respectability. Anything with the huge dependency set and vast amount of wasted hard drive space for the most basic install should have long been reviewed and discarded to the junk heap long ago.

This is a sincere appeal to the software development community: please stop perpetuating TeX by writing software that depends on it. There are many alternative typesetting systems which do as good a job, or better, than TeX, that don't reek of poor design and bloat; please consider these, even if -- just because you were introduced in college to TeX -- you have some experience with it.  TeX has always been a bad choice. It's a fully Touring-complete programming language, making it entirely unsuitable for typesetting.  It's why the Web is programmed in HTML.

Just say No! to TeX!