Hacker News Reader

An old article, but a great read. Tying together writing and programming Lisp is insightful and if I could extend his ideas a little: writing using a light weight but very powerful tool like Latex seems similar to programming in a Lisp environment that may also be powerful but after a learning curve, the language and environment stay out of your way. Writing with Latex seems that way to me.

View on HN

> writing using a light weight but very powerful tool like Latex

Can you please explain in what way LaTeX is lightweight? IIRC, LaTeX is a macro layer above TeX which is a layer above something written in "web" which (don't know the details here, but) I think may be translated to C (web2c) for building.

Also, last time I looked, the Texlive distribution is something like at least 100 MB.

Light weight in the sense that adding Latex formatting to a text document is easy and does not (much) get n the way of writing. Also, moving material around, referring to figures, sections, etc. is all easy. I have not tweaked my Latex setup in a long time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com