imagine the world where every program is written in C++, and every document (including all websites) is written in LaTeX.

You mean a university maths department?

Can we try this? Pretty please?

IMO, documents should be written in html and websites should not.

It'd be a beautiful and fast world.

Is LaTeX any good at variable page sizes? Responsive layout? I know it's slow as shit to render so we'd have to add that multi-second delay on every navigation. No browser apps, you just have to install 7 or so chat apps on every computer you own with file system access and everything. None of them are distributed for Linux. YouTube has ring 0 anti-adblock.

@lorentz fixed, non-responsive page layouts in pdf and latex is exactly why I think html should be the standard for documents.

It's 2025 and we still use document formats which mimic printed paper and don‘t respond to different screen sizes.

Don't be John Lennon!

@devJs no, John Lennon was right!

@Lensflare I think LaTeX actually supports variable layouts in principle, only maybe you need a bit of Haskell.

which brings me to the third reason why this would suck; web content would arbitrarily depend on plug-ins that you can't properly sandbox, a lot like the old java applets and adobe flash, except they would be less useful because their functionality is limited by PDF.

@lorentz if latex was the standard in web, we would have the tech to sandbox all that we need to render it.

In this timeline we would find it unrealistic that something like html and js could ever be used for websites because it would be too much trouble to sandbox that stuff.

@Lensflare in that timeline we would be mercifully unaware of JavaScript as a concept. I guess if you must sandbox a compiled language, Haskell isn't the worst option, with how difficult and explicit side effects are.

In that alternate reality, humanity built no enterprise proprietary frameworks and never had the internet as we know it today. It could only have happened if their reality had branched out from ours in the mid-90s.

Obviously, humanity then evolved so fast that they built a cost-effective fusion reactor before 9/11, got world peace by the time we were in the great recession, and finally they became pure energy beings right on time for the 2020 pandemic.
Now they look at us from their omnicient point of view and are fully aware that if they look too hard, they will start to devolve.

@JsonBoa

"Genie, I wish there was enough food on this Earth that no one ever had to go hungry."

"Granted," he replied with a laugh, but nothing changed.

@lorentz I always thought it was designed specifically for print rendering...

If you're a proper mathematician there's no need to render LaTeX because your brain supports it natively.

@donkulator but what about the rest of us?

@donkulator hehe

@kiki also why not something easier to read like an unmanaged c# ?