[MayeulC]

Oh, I'm with you on a lot of things here, and I've just typeset my PhD manuscript with it, being a longtime (10 years) user.

LaTeX does not feel like a programming language. It is first and foremost designed as a macro language, which is nice for writing text, not that much for implementing algorithms.

I quite like what lualatex is doing, including a lua interpreter to add some simple code to your document, and make writing packages easier. I admit I haven't used yet, being afraid of compatibility issues. I know a friend also uses a package to interoperate with python.

This doesn't completely solve my main gripes with LaTeX though, including the slow compilation speed (while 95% could be cached), and the bad error messages, as well as the brittleness of the programming part (I ended up typesetting my manuscript in 9pt because I forgot a comma after the previous documentclass argument).

And the adoption is slow, packages stick to the most compatible baseline.

Maybe the future really is to restrict LaTeX use to minor parts of the text, like Markdown (pandoc?). But there's still some value in having a plugin system that doesn't require additional dependencies.

[bee_rider]

The only thing I really don’t like about LaTeX is the slow compilations, which could I guess be solved by caching or breaking up my file.

OTOH, I’m of sure to what extent this slow compilation is actually just a symptom of something bad in the language. I’ve included a bunch of packages in my file, which probably slow down compilation, due to the fact that they have to deal with ancient cruft.