[TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff

[bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah)]

On Mon, 07 May 2018 17:39:58 -0700 Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> IMHO, the tex language is too ugly.  I much prefer troff.  But, and maybe this
> will be a retirement project, giving troff tex's two-dimensional layout smarts
> so that widows and orphans don't have to be handled manually would be nice.
> 
> Remember, we're lucky that Don didn't work on X Windows because he would
> have called it Ech.

You can pronounce TeX as if it is written in Cyrillic: Tiyekh!
And then of course, LyaTiyekh!

Though I vastly prefer TeX/LaTeX/XeLaTeX over troff (unlike
most folks on this list) and find even the source code more
legible than ugly control lines starting with a "." -- In *TeX
I can reformat most parahraphs to balance lines, without
things falling aport.

Now one can avoid most of the hassles for simple documentation
by using markdown or asciidoc & tools that generate .tex,
which can be rendered beautifully. Even here you can typically
use LaTeX formatting for equations.