I use ConTeXt. It is a perpetual moving target. If you want a document to keep compiling to the same result, you'd better pin a version :-/
They keep on adding things, experimenting things, sometimes removing things, changing engines. If they think of a feature or someone asks for it, they implement it right away as a fix. They are very nice and helpful, but the problem is that those small features and fixes are not sufficiently thought out to maintain consistency. They are just there to get things done on the moment.
The documentation is mostly at introduction level, whether it is named that way or not. It is almost never exhaustive, it is often not up to date. Often, the options are not described, you just have their name: no idea about what they do, let alone how they interact.
Because things interact there too, and as with LaTeX, it doesn't always interact well, despite the more integrated approach that ConTeXt proposes.
It (more and more?) shares some of the problems of LaTeX. LaTeX has many different packages for the same thing (let's say tables) and none of those is complete? Same thing in ConTeXt nowadays, there are several table environments, and none of them is a pure improvement upon the others. So a package/environment adds a feature compared to an existing one, but it doesn't include all the features of existing ones. So you often end up with the same category of problem:
-- I want to do A => use this package/environment!
-- I want to do B => use that package/environment!
-- I want to do A and B => you're out of luck!
Yes, I am a bit, no, a lot pissed at the moment:
a. by my constant or growing struggles to get some stuff done on ConTeXt and LaTeX, stuff which doesn't look from outerspace and seems it should be handled out of the box, without needing to get dirty with low-level macros just to get stuff to behave consistently (because often said stuff actually works in some cases);
b. by the lack of robustness those tools are still showing, despite decades of massive time and energy investment by people who have a much better understanding of these shenanigans than I have. This is emphasised by my recent attempt to come back to LaTeX and the subsequent finding that I am hitting the same kind of exhausting inconsistencies I was hitting 10 years ago.
I am so depressed about the situation that I think that it must be impossible to build something robust upon TeX as a programming language. TeX the composition algorithm is probably fine, but building something based on this fragile, clunky macro language is probably destined to end up being fragile and clunky, in spite of the original intent. The automation of composition is already a difficult subject with a great many moving, interacting pieces; having to deal with such a rough language on top of this...
They keep on adding things, experimenting things, sometimes removing things, changing engines. If they think of a feature or someone asks for it, they implement it right away as a fix. They are very nice and helpful, but the problem is that those small features and fixes are not sufficiently thought out to maintain consistency. They are just there to get things done on the moment.
The documentation is mostly at introduction level, whether it is named that way or not. It is almost never exhaustive, it is often not up to date. Often, the options are not described, you just have their name: no idea about what they do, let alone how they interact.
Because things interact there too, and as with LaTeX, it doesn't always interact well, despite the more integrated approach that ConTeXt proposes.
It (more and more?) shares some of the problems of LaTeX. LaTeX has many different packages for the same thing (let's say tables) and none of those is complete? Same thing in ConTeXt nowadays, there are several table environments, and none of them is a pure improvement upon the others. So a package/environment adds a feature compared to an existing one, but it doesn't include all the features of existing ones. So you often end up with the same category of problem:
-- I want to do A => use this package/environment! -- I want to do B => use that package/environment! -- I want to do A and B => you're out of luck!
Yes, I am a bit, no, a lot pissed at the moment:
a. by my constant or growing struggles to get some stuff done on ConTeXt and LaTeX, stuff which doesn't look from outerspace and seems it should be handled out of the box, without needing to get dirty with low-level macros just to get stuff to behave consistently (because often said stuff actually works in some cases);
b. by the lack of robustness those tools are still showing, despite decades of massive time and energy investment by people who have a much better understanding of these shenanigans than I have. This is emphasised by my recent attempt to come back to LaTeX and the subsequent finding that I am hitting the same kind of exhausting inconsistencies I was hitting 10 years ago.
I am so depressed about the situation that I think that it must be impossible to build something robust upon TeX as a programming language. TeX the composition algorithm is probably fine, but building something based on this fragile, clunky macro language is probably destined to end up being fragile and clunky, in spite of the original intent. The automation of composition is already a difficult subject with a great many moving, interacting pieces; having to deal with such a rough language on top of this...