Comment by gucci-on-fleek

> so much as the basic architecture which is highly coupled to the limitations of computers in the late 70s/early 80s when even 7-bit ASCII couldn’t be assumed to be consistent between systems¹. As much as I enjoy writing TeX macros and can do wonderful things with them that most people would consider dark magic

Well LuaTeX solves both of these problems, but I'm pretty sure that you're already aware of that :)

> it’s a cursed way to do programming and has no parallel in any other programming paradigm

It's fairly similar to C preprocessor macros, and writing Mathematica code occasionally reminds me of TeX, but these aren't exactly the most flattering comparisons.