General ⇒ Where is TeX.NET?

[woltan]

Hey folks,
I've been fooling around with LaTeX for quite a while now, and pretty much am able to tweak the looks of my document how I want it to look. Not too long ago I decided to take a deeper step and dived into the world of TeX.
Soon I realized that there are many rules and regulations, and I wondered if it has to be like this? It kind of reminded me of the early stages of programming, where in some cases you'd even have to make sure, that there is a certain number of spaces at the beginning of a line^^. Taking into account that TeX was created in the late 60s, which is a hell of a long time for a, let me call it API, I wondered if there is a new approach in the field of typesetting? Something like the development of the C# programming language, which gives the user a great deal of liberty and simultaneously ensures that the mistakes produces by the programmer are limited to their skills. Looking at TeX feels like reading C code.

So is there something new going on, or is everybody happy with what TeX does and how it does it? Is it so hard to build a new typesetting 'API', with the modern means of technology?

I hope I could point out the questions I had, and I want to conclude this posting with the assertion, that I do value what TeX does and I can't think of how a document could look nicer and prettier.
Looking forward to your thoughts

cherio Woltan

ps sorry for me bad english^^

[josephwright]

Well, there is the work that the LaTeX3 project are doing to develop a better LaTeX on top of TeX. There is also LuaTeX, which brings Lua scripting to TeX.