alt Hacker News> I would be personally a little disappointed if Typst replaced LaTeX, but until that happens, I definitely hope that it continues to do well.
I'm curious about why you'd be disappointed. Is it because you think typst is an irremediably inferior technology to you or is it because you are invested in LaTex?
I do not mean to ask this in accusatory way. I'm not very well informed about typst or tex (I've only used typst once and I thought it was easy and nice).
I'm just curious about what is worse about typst that would make someone disappointed if that was the reason why you would be.
It's mostly that I'm quite personally invested in TeX, far more than most people are. I work on it nearly every day, and I'm even hosting an international TeX conference about a month from now [0].
I do have a few minor concerns about Typst, mainly that its parsing/compiling strategy allows less introspection and extensibility than TeX does (but this is necessary for its fast compile times), and the fact that it's backed by a for-profit company seems less robust than TeX's 50-year history of volunteer maintainership. And of course Typst is still missing quite a few features, but if it's successful I can't imagine that this will be an issue.
Also, I personally mostly use ConTeXt [1], which compiles much faster than LaTeX and has a very uniform syntax, so switching to Typst wouldn't have as many benefits compared to if I were switching from LaTeX.
So if Typst were to take over, I'd mainly be disappointed that my very deep knowledge of TeX would be no longer relevant. But I also wouldn't be surprised if Typst ultimately revitalized TeX, since it might motivate us to improve TeX even more, and Typst might be a good entrypoint for users interested in plain text typesetting (who might then switch to TeX if they find Typst too limiting).
[0]: https://tug.org/tug2026/
[1]: ConTeXt uses the same underlying TeX engine as LaTeX, but different macros. See https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb46-3/tb144berry-engines-formats.pd... for a brief overview.