Part of what bothers me so much about TeX is how obscure and opaque the language feels. I am familiar with ten programming languages, from C and assembly to Haskell, Perl, Lisp. But just the way that people write TeX macros makes everything so unapproachable. The only insight I have gleaned is that it's like one big fat state machine, which makes it extremely hard to code with principle.
I understand Knuth wrote a book, but reading through it has only made me wonder more about the bizarre choices.
I understand Knuth wrote a book, but reading through it has only made me wonder more about the bizarre choices.