It's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at once.

Posts/discussion I found interesting:

- http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald...

- https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15733381

In particular it's interesting how people seem to think TeX itself is actually quite nice to use but its popularity and LaTeX packages created a huge mess of a system.

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.