[hyperbovine]

Strongly agree. It's taboo to criticize TeX because of who wrote it, but let's be honest: from a usability perspective it's atrocious. Cryptic error messages, code that rivals assembler for readability ... hell even the directory layout makes no sense to me, and I've been using TeX daily for over ten years. I hold Knuth in high regard as a scientist, and there's no arguing that TeX is a technical masterpiece which revolutionized the field of mathematics--but this is not the typesetting language that's going to carry us through to the next century (I hope).

[chimeracoder]

> Strongly agree. It's taboo to criticize TeX because of who wrote it,

I assume you're referring to Knuth, but it's important to distinguish between TeX and LaTeX (the latter was written by Leslie Lamport).

The distinction between TeX and LaTeX is actually relevant here.

[tieTYT]

> The distinction between TeX and LaTeX is actually relevant here.

I know very little about both. Could you elaborate on the relevance?

[ygra]

TeX is the low-level typesetting system and programming language. LaTeX is a set of macros on top of that that try to support a more semantic approach to document layout. If you see long command names that more or less spell out what they do, it's usually LaTeX. If you see short, cryptic abbreviated commands it's usually TeX.

[AnimalMuppet]

And if you use either TeX or LaTeX instead of Lyx, you're a masochist.