I see you got downvoted but people don’t get that choice of technology based on who you can hire is a valid point.
I remember a guy who wanted to make company documentation in LaTeX. Well yes it is great tool and we could put it in a git repo and render nice documents for the customers easily. Downside was 15-20 sales people who were not thrilled to use it and spend time learning how to use it.
Hey, I work in a company where user-facing documentation is written in LaTeX! I even contributed few commits to it.
I'm not sure though why sales people would need to edit it.
My discontent with LaTeX for documentation is that searching it sucks. I mean, you do get literal search for words, but if you want something smarter... PDFs don't interact well with searching tools we have.
Another problem: interactive scroll. In HTML documents you can scroll sections of documents independently of each other (if you need to), so you can create ad hoc views of your documentation that could be more useful to you (eg. collapse a bunch of tables or code listings just to see the text in between).
On the other hand, if you want to print it, oh man... it's going to look so much better! :)
Because there were no dedicated people writing documentation, there were developers and sales people - that was it. Non technical documentation so "how to use the system" was going to be written by sales people.
Lots of times in a company you work with what you have and finding and hiring "technical writer who has experience or wants to work with LaTeX" I would count as hard task.
I used to be on good terms with a technical writer from a company I worked for some time ago. He later became one of the very few people who were let go as a result of a merger. Also, from what I can tell, technical writer isn't a cushy job, not anywhere near even entry-level programming jobs. Also, it's usually at companies with existing and large user-base, relatively large companies... there's not a lot of jobs on the market.
I mean, I have a feeling that if a company asked a technical writer to learn LaTeX, they would probably do it, even on their own time. It's a tough market, and learning LaTeX enough to produce something isn't a huge effort (also, there are a bunch of tools that prepare the boilerplate code for documents). But I can see how sales people might not have been impressed by such prospects.
I think a lot of devs are frustrated with the state of modern Javascript. As I speak I am waiting for "mvn install" to run for a system that has a Java back end and a Javascript front end which compiles both. I think the Java part would finish in about 20 seconds, the Javascript bit is more like 250 seconds. There would be 250 seconds of working instead of posting to HN if the system was "100% pure Java".
(To be fair I am mostly depending on an incremental build and I'd say Java turns around in 2s, Javascript in about 20s. One of those breaks my chain of thought, the other doesn't.)
I never understood why you would need to compile frontend javascript code. Yea maybe a minimizer, obfuscator, some coping etc during a build process. But thats it.
My frontend apps are running on the fly. Change in code requires a save and browser refresh. No ammoying compiling .
Well, there're things like React's JSX, CoffeeScript, TypeScript and all of the fricking Babel stuff, all require some kind of transpiling (or how babel names it, compiling), and probably that is what OP means.
