[Tex/LaTex] Future of TeX and LaTeX

Question

Disclaimer: typically soft question.

I was reading about expl3 and LaTeX3 development and try to stumble something about overall future of LaTeX. All I can find is one article.

The article mostly covers the output: fonts, encoding, hyphens, positioning; but I found no information of future of LaTeX internals: interaction with other languages (luatex, different python packages, knitr as a preprocessor), namespaces, more robust syntax, making TeX more functional with lazy evaluation and purity (I found TeX very similar to Haskell ideologically).

Is there are any overview of this?

Answer 1

Here's one answer, by Deyan Ginev: LaTeX is Dead (long live LaTeX): Typesetting in the Digital Age. He focuses quite a bit on output, but touches on content and process as well.

The article is predicated on this two-part claim.

The web-first scientific manuscripts of 2015 are HTML5 documents. LaTeX is one of several viable, yet imperfect, authoring languages for the web.

His "nutshell summary":

Structural document formats, such as HTML, generalize over and may eventually supersede print-oriented formats, such as PDF.

His workflow for producing the linked document:

This blog post is cross-hosted on both Authorea and a static web site. For the static hosting, I currently write content in LaTeX and have a smart bit of Ruby create a PDF and an HTML5 blog post out of my “text program”, using XeLaTeX and LaTeXML. I then upload the bundle to GitHub and deploy to my Ruby on Rails site on Digital Ocean. This sounds like, and in fact is, an exercise in programming and juggling technology stacks.

My own opinion, as a LaTeXML user and also based on looking at some recent discussions on tex.sxe, like this one: How to embed Javascript in LaTeX Beamer? is that there are certainly quite a few points of convergence.