I might have gone overboard with "thousands of _awesome_ packages", but the CTAN I'm looking at lists 4706 packages from around 2000 authors. I'm not sure how you determined that most of these are redundant and/or obsolete. At least MacTex seems to ship with quite a lot of them (2.3G with 600M optionals).
I would be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of users can get by with less than 50 packages.
When did I claim that this is not the case? Less then 50 packages yes, but not the same packages for all users.. Many packages for many different use-cases.
Statements like this are terrible for latex adoption
Yeah sure, because the people here at HN will think "Oh no if there are thousands of packages I will need to learn _all of them_ before writing my first document.
I'd say that what's terrible for LaTeX adoption is that it's terrible annoying to write...
Comments
"With all due respect" sigh
I might have gone overboard with "thousands of _awesome_ packages", but the CTAN I'm looking at lists 4706 packages from around 2000 authors. I'm not sure how you determined that most of these are redundant and/or obsolete. At least MacTex seems to ship with quite a lot of them (2.3G with 600M optionals).
When did I claim that this is not the case? Less then 50 packages yes, but not the same packages for all users.. Many packages for many different use-cases.
Yeah sure, because the people here at HN will think "Oh no if there are thousands of packages I will need to learn _all of them_ before writing my first document.
I'd say that what's terrible for LaTeX adoption is that it's terrible annoying to write...
Why "sigh" at a remark that was written in order to be polite and yet still convey strong disagreement?