Assuming it's at all desirable, it's an interesting and recurring problem of how to dislodge existing sub-optimal (sometimes even harmful) standards and notations.

Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar.

Creates a heck of a momentum effect, not just from the practitioners resisting the change, but also available resources and so on.

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josephg 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar.

Yeah, I wrote a paper using typst - which was much more pleasant to draft. But for the final version submitted to the journal, we ended up converting it to latex because that's what the journal wanted.

I think it'll be hard to dislodge latex for academic papers - particularly in CS. But there's plenty of other uses for it. Personally I'm looking forward to HTML output. I want to use it to write blog posts and long form documentation. (Markdown simply isn't powerful enough for my needs.)

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gucci-on-fleek 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> it's an interesting and recurring problem of how to dislodge existing sub-optimal (sometimes even harmful) standards and notations.

> Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar.

There are lots of people (myself included) who genuinely like LaTeX, so it's not just inertia preventing people from switching (although that is definitely a significant factor).

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bonoboTP 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If the software is actually good, it can start from an enthusiastic core of students, PhD students and later niche conference organizers and niche journal editors and if they gossip about their experience, it can spread through word of mouth if it's sufficiently good.

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marginalia_nu 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah I think this is correct, with the added caveat that it must be as good as the alternative PLUS the awkwardness of switching to have any hopes of breaking out of the local minimum.

Otherwise you become Dvorak, which despite being better than Qwerty and having been around for almost a hundred years, still hasn't seen widespread adoption, in this case because the awkwardness of switching is very significant. The effect is likely smaller on something like Typst.

	▲	lupire 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Dvorak is only slightly better than Qwerty at most.

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__mharrison__ 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm convinced no one really knows tex/latex. Everyone googles enough to get by.

Typst on the other hand is completely sensible.

It takes less time to learn typst than to refresh on latex.

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benrutter 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar.

I think it depends on what the thing is. I use LaTeX for occasional documentation, a better version would save me a maximum of 5 minutes a year. I probably won't be an early Typst adopter.

But, I spend loads of time for example, working with dataframes in Python. I got into Polars fairly early because improvements in that space can massively affect my productivity.

If you're routinely using LaTeX to write papers, the time spent learning something new isn't comparably large.

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zelphirkalt 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If a better Latex only saves you 5 minutes per year, then that means, that you are either a latex god, who types 200wpm in special characters and talks latex fluently, or, that you don't actually write much documentation per year, or, that someone else has invested significant time to create all the document layout, macros, environments, etc. so that you only need to type the text.

My point is, that creating a proper latex document, specific to one's use case can consume many hours of time.

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nbernard 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> If you're routinely using LaTeX to write papers, the time spent learning something new isn't comparably large.

I don't know. By then aren't you quite comfortable with LaTeX?

It may be Stockholm syndrome and sunk costs speaking, but I'm using LaTeX all the time: I quite like it and I don't feel any need for something else to replace it...

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__mharrison__ 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Folks who know latex would benefit the most from typst, just from the compiling aspect.

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setr 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Text editors progress one funeral at a time.

	▲	nbernard 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Scientific text editors, you mean? ;) I suspect it is actually worse than that and that they are actually subject to the Lindy effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect ).

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mystifyingpoi 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

See: YAML, JS, /etc structure, credit cards in US...

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marginalia_nu 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Keyboards being modeled after typewriters, unit of electrical charge being negative, pi being half a turn, etc.

Our basis vectors are very much wide of the mark.

	▲	spookie 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We... have failed so much...