TEX
the program
by Donald Knuth · first published 1985
36% recommend55% neutral9% critical
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
Related books
2007–2023METAFONT
Donald Knuth
Recommended by 1 · mentioned by 121 recommend · 12 mention1 recommend · 121 recommend
Computers and Typesetting
Donald Knuth
Recommended by 6 · mentioned by 146 recommend · 14 mention6 recommend · 146 recommend
2009–2026Literate programming
Donald Knuth
Recommended by 18 · mentioned by 9418 recommend · 94 mention18 recommend · 9418 recommend
2008–2026The TeXbook
Donald Knuth
Recommended by 25 · mentioned by 4325 recommend · 43 mention25 recommend · 4325 recommend
2007–2026The art of computer programming
Donald Knuth
Recommended by 336 · mentioned by 1,125336 recommend · 1,125 mention336 recommend · 1,125336 recommend
2007–2026Programming Pearls
Jon Bentley
Recommended by 158 · mentioned by 245158 recommend · 245 mention158 recommend · 245158 recommend
2007–2026Algorithms
Robert Sedgewick
Recommended by 50 · mentioned by 8250 recommend · 82 mention50 recommend · 8250 recommend
2008–2025Mastering Regular Expressions
Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
Recommended by 58 · mentioned by 8458 recommend · 84 mention58 recommend · 8458 recommend
EDIT: Release notes: https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html# One technology that has stood the test of time- amazingly well designed TeX by Donald Knuth and LaTeX by Leslie Lamport. Plain TeX can be a bit beginner unfriendly…
on “TeX Live 2019” ↗I read the entire book "TeX: The Program" by Donald Knuth, Computers and Typesetting, Volume B.
on “Which programming book you just couldn’t stop reading from start to end?” ↗It's a bit old, of course, but TeX: The Program is still a fascinating read because of the exceptional attention that Knuth has paid to exposition, especially for a program that size. Besides, TeX is still being used after almost 40 years,…
on “One Way to Improve Your Coding” ↗The Stockfish chess engine: https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish I learned a ridiculous amount from reading the source code to TeX (https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Typesetting-B-TeX-Program/d...) but it is written in a very 1970s style.
on “Ask HN: What are some well written/engineered open source software?” ↗Memory available to the browser was limited, sub-pixel rendering was impractical. There is a commercial product 'MathType' that uses TeX to render beautiful mathematics on web pages but I don't know if they have a WebGL version or not. If you read Don Knuth's book on TeX you can probably figure out how to make it run.
on “Ask HN: How far are we from in-browser typesetting” ↗I wouldn't describe TeX as a "standard", but it's pretty hard to argue that it's "closed": TeX is arguably the best documented program in history! Knuth wrote it using his novel "literate programming" technique in which the…
on “MathML is a failed web standard” ↗> No LaTeX, extremely minimal bibliography. I prefer TeX! And I've published applied math with just TeX, sent to Information Sciences, an Elsevier journal, and they handled the TeX source easily! I prefer TeX…
on “Infinitely many twin primes” ↗To the contrary, TeX (not LaTeX) has one of the best error-handling and error-recovery interfaces of any commandline program — if you use TeX as Knuth intended, that is, if you use plain TeX at the commandline and if you…
on “Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves” ↗Donald Knuth shaved the ultimate yak. He wanted to write a book with mathematics in it so he implemented what for decades has been industry-standard mathematical typesetting system: TeX. That's remarkable. I just wish he'd finish the book.
on “The Yoda of Silicon Valley” ↗I suggest the source code of TeX. Not new, but still very interesting to read. source that needs some postprocessing (tangle/weave): http://mirrors.ctan.org/systems/knuth/dist/tex/tex.web PDF from the source (including hyperlinks)…
on “Ask HN: What source code is worth studying? ” ↗Others have already described TeX quite well. One important feature not mentioned is that it is virtually error free now and is frozen at version 3.14159... (yes pi) Donald Knuth decided that there is value in having a system that for…
on “Docbook” ↗I guess around fourteen years ago—back when I was at high school—I picked up the legendary TeXbook. I was in love and totally beguiled by the great Knuth's Art of Computer Programming; how could it be so beautiful? how could it be so precise? and henceforth as I understood the he had developed…
on “Taste Is All That's Left” ↗And turned the source code of the tooling into a book! https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Typesetting-B-TeX-Program/d...
on “The Tools I Use to Write Books” ↗(author here) Thanks for nicely summarizing the project! I didn't know about fftw, but another nice analogy is TeX by Donald Knuth! TeX is actually written in WEB / a subset of Pascal (H-Pascal I think), and then translated to C. That is, it's NOT typically compiled with a Pascal compiler (I wonder if anyone even…
on “Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years” ↗…1982. 6502 Assembler 1982. Pascal (this became my primary high-level programming language in 1986–1992) 1984. C 1985. Rexx (still the best scripting language I've worked with) 1985. FORTRAN 1986. TeX (programming in a macro-expansion language is it's own bizarro world) 1987. PostScript (the joys of coding in a stack-based Forth derivative) 1988. Modula-2 1988. Metafont (Another Knuth macro-expansion…
on “Seven Deadly Sins of Introductory Programming Language Design (1996) [pdf]” ↗