Tim's (still) not blogging

TeX

Get far enough in math(s), and you’ll probably try using Word’s Equation Editor. Then you’ll probably never use it again, because you’ve thrown your computer across the room.

Read about computer history and you’ll see that the general trend starts with every user needing to tell the computer how exactly to perform every little step and heads toward layers of abstraction (built by users before you) resulting in your being able to just tell the computer what you want and the lower layers handle the details of “how”. (All of this software has been written too, often by a bunch of users realizing they can pool their resources to build a foundational layer that others can build on more simply.)

Can you tell I have, I fact, been reading computer history books?

HTML is probably the first popular example of a descriptive computer language, where you specify what you want, and some other layer (Netscape Navigator Gold) handles how your text-based HTML gets displayed as colorful text arranged in tables and bulleted lists.

My second taste of this was

I think I was heading toward TeX, but who knows?