Khaled Hosny <khaledho...@eglug.org> skribis: > Well, things are changing now with the advent of LuaTeX, thanks to its > backward compatibility, it is taking slowly over TeX world (see ConTeXt > for example, which is being rewritten in Lua), unlike ANT which never > gained momentum.
ANT, written almost entirely by one guy in an actual programming language, never gained momentum because people have had their minds numbed by TeX and glorified assembly languages. We have had issue after issue after issue of TUGboat, year after year, devoted to newer and more intricate ways to drive a nail with a sponge. The appeal is understandable; give me a chance to write in an assembly language, when I was still capable of such things, and I could get lost in it. Even fontforge is written in a mere glorified assembly language that is the main reason the program crashes, crashes, crashes, because the compiler is happy to compile stupid things that an OCaml compiler would never come close to accepting and which no one should have to worry about in 2010 in an application. This is all kind of off-topic, but it is too easy to get sucked into bit twiddling. Bit twiddling is a curse on mankind. OFLB can have all kinds of bells and whistles, but some graphic design and an effort to appeal to actual, non-TeXie font-users have made League of Moveable Type a more productive place to post fonts, from my point of view wherein, frankly, TeXies can be taken for granted. They'll use anything capable of doing text, even if it is buried under three layers of tarballing in an ftp directory on an obscure host. :)
