Re: 3DLDF

[Laurence Finston]

> 
> I was initially very impressed with TeX, and tried do a couple of things in
> it. But then I found that it has sneaky trap: it invites you to do advanced
> things in elitistic manners, but programming features to carry these things
> to the ends are not really there in the language. So I was by that put off
> by the Knuthian ways.
> 

TeX wasn't intended to be a programming language.  I use something I call the
"3 \expandafter rule".  If I need more than 3 `\expandafters' for anything, I
write a preprocessor instead.  I've found that LISP and TeX work very well
together.

I don't think either TeX or Metafont was intended to be the last word in
computerized typesetting or font design, respectively.   I admire Knuth's
accomplishments, but it's his way of going about things that impresses me
most.  Certainly I  wouldn't want to write a program in the style he used for
TeX and Metafont, but one could learn a lot by reading these programs.

I don't feel anywhere near having plumbed the depths of C++.  I'm also an
applications programmer rather than a systems programmer or a computer
scientist.  I think the level of systems programming and computer science is
generally higher than that of most applications programming (although I think
there's some lousy system programming, too).   I'd like to see the level of
applications programming improve.

This is another thing I admire about Knuth;  he has a good balance of the
theoretical and the practical in his work.

Laurence