TeX and Metafont

According to the Jargon File, "Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting in volumes I-III of his monumental "Art of Computer Programming" (see Knuth, also bible). In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years."

I'm sorry. Readers who are sane, or who have sane acquaintances, or who are not familiar with the wilder shores of computer programmers and their personality diseases, may not quite have taken in that last passage. For their benefit, I'll repeat it, in bold, and with a hyperlink to the source so that they can independently verify that I didn't make it up to slander Knuth.

Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting in volumes I-III of his monumental "Art of Computer Programming" (see Knuth, also bible). In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years.

So in other words, Knuth is the kind of guy who would rather spend eight years locked away in a stinky computer lab, than pick up the phone once to complain to his typesetters and tell them to do it properly. Rather than trouble himself with five minutes of human interaction, he spent eight years snivelling over a keyboard. That's the calibre of individual we're dealing with here.

It completely beggars belief. For reference, here's how I would address this problem; brrring brrring, hello, typesetting department, jsm here, could you sort out the typesetting in my book please it's a disgrace, certainly sir, goodbye. Total time taken, five minutes max. By my calculations, this method is approximately 2,522,880 times more efficient than Knuth's. I say "approximately" because I didn't allow for leap years. I didn't allow for leap years because it's completely unimportant and a purely illustrative statistic in any case. That's an example of a "proportionate amount of effort", by the way; spending eight years correcting a typing error isn't. Not that you can do something so simple as correct a typing error in TeX without first committing an 800 page manual to memory. It's a Turing-complete language, you see, highly useful for people who want to solve the Halting Problem every time they need to change their line spacing, but how many of those do you meet in a typical day? None, unless you quite literally live in the computer lab

And furthermore, the finished product shows beyond a scintilla of doubt that those eight years were largely wasted (that is, assuming that Knuth was actually writing the program during that time; if he spent most of the time like a typical "hacker", drinking Mountain Dew and masturbating, they weren't entirely wasted). TeX is, relative to its reputation, the worst typesetting program ever invented:

• It is ugly. The output of TeX comes in a special TeX font, which appears to have been specially designed to make people think that their printer is running out of toner. The spindly letters clash wonderfully with their bulky, overbearing bold versions, while the typesetting puts an extra pica or two into the line-spacing, guaranteeing that no matter how polished a TeX manuscript, it will always look like a rough draft that's been printed out double-spaced for editing. TeX is the program of choice for people who have produced extremely bad PhD theses, and want them to be as painful to read as they were to write.
• It is unusable. TeX boosters optimistically try to claim that "Because one need not worry about the document layout, one is free to concentrate on the content". Which is true in a way; if one doesn't give a fuck what the finished product looks like, one is free to concentrate on the content, although quite why something which is also true of daubing shit on prison walls should be held up as a unique feature of TeX is perhaps another matter. TeX is a lean, clean algorithmic machine, designed to take massive, unwieldy input files and convert them into massive unwieldy output files, the difference being that the input files are full of bizarre counterintuitive syntax and the output files look like shit. And of course, if you want one of the many features unsupported by TeX (like, for example, page numbering starting on a number other than 1), you are free to dive into nine megabytes of uncommented C code and make the necessary "hacks" yourself. Ah the wonders of Open Source.

So in other words, Knuth produced a product that gives you results that look distinctly worse than if you'd used MS Word, while forcing you to learn a massive amount of practically useless contorted macro language. No wonder the self-styled "hackers" love it. The main purpose of TeX is as an indicator of books that can safely be ignored forever; as soon as you see the spindly characters march across the page, with their lines too far apart, you know that the piece of paper you are looking at was produced by a grade A wanker, who has enough spare short-term memory to learn TeX and wants the world to know it. Such people never have anything interesting to say.

Bluth managed, however, to anticipate the "Open Source Development Model" (whereby a weak product is innoculated from criticism by giving people free access to the source code, so that anyone who points out that the fucking thing doesn't work looks like a curmudgeon for carping about the problem instead of fixing it), by giving away $2.56 each to the legion of TeX sufferers who wrote to him complaining of bugs. He chose the amount of $2.56 because 256 is the eighth power of two. This counts as a joke in Open Source circles.

The Art of Computer Programming

The first work to be typeset in the then-new and then-horrifically buggy TeX was, of course, Bluth's own book, "The Art of Computer Programming". Again, we at the adequacy.org Reputation Destruction Squad have a number of issues with this product of Knuth's wayward genius:

1. It isn't. Art, that is; it's a book of mathematical formulae with no art whatever in it. Knuth, a talented animator in his spare time, clearly knew a thing or two about art, so quite why he chose to bring the word "art" into the title of a wholly non-artistic computer manual is beyond me.
2. It isn't all that good. Apart from being shot through with weak humor, TAOCP is a book that is almost exclusively loved by those who haven't read it. Like the other great compendium of cut'n'paste algorithms for people who don't quite understand what they're doing, Numerical Recipes, Knuth's book is the toolkit of a bodger; a jack of all trades, master of none, and written in a private language, unintelligible to anyone but its creator.

   Of course, this doesn't matter, as TAOCP is a coffee-table book, designed to be owned as a status symbol rather than ever read. Anyone who cares about algorithms uses more specialised manuals, and anyone who takes Knuth seriously is too stupid to read him. Frankly, they could have all but the first ten pages completely blank and less than a per cent of owners would ever know (this would also get rid of those pesky typesetting problems).

3. It's half a fucking product. Like Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Dickens' "Mystery of Edwin Drood", TAOCP's reputation is dependent on its half-complete status. It is judged, not on the basis of the book that actually exists, but rather as the Platonic, perfect compendium that exists in Bluth's pipe dreams. Of course, anyone wanting to know what Donald Bluth thinks about "Combinatorial Algorithms" and "Syntactic Algorithms", let alone "Compiler Techniques", has been shit out of luck for the last twenty years, but hey, writing TeX was more important.

Face it. The "Art" of Computer Programming will never be finished. Like Harold Brodkey, Donald Knuth's reputation rests completely on not finishing it. And in tribute to his unique method of finding a place at the pinnacle of the geek pantheon, this review essay