The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

I was agog when I downloaded the LaTeX binary install for my new Mac a few years ago and discovered how massive it was. LaTeX is almost as big as the entire operating system disk!

What on earth is in there?

Not the whole thing, but you could start with this:

http://www.amazon.com/Computers-Typesetting-Volumes-Boxed-Se...

[looks sadly at own unread copy sigh]

that doesn't solve the OP is really talking about, it merely moves it around.

the idea that LaTeX has a messy codebase is almost mindboggling to me--I had assumed that TeX--practically the only code that's published as a book (see: The TeX Book) would be clean. I guess the complaint is mostly about the Pascal + C that's code-generated by TANGLE.

The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility. If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free. A new implementation will certainly not be. Joel Spolsky said it very well http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I disagree that the current situation is LaTeX developers' fault. TeX and LaTeX are complex pieces of software, that are developed over time. They were extended as the capabilities of their platforms increased, to take advantage of those capabilities. This requires full access to the OS utilities, and naturally LaTeX environment does that. If anything, this is Apple's fault. For whatever reason, they cannot allow applications to use the existing capabilities of the underlying OS. This goes against the Unix mindset; of course there will be unpleasant consequences, but one cannot hold Unix mindset responsible for these.