> This is all much more convenient in its WYSIWYG interface than manually planning and coding these figures in LaTeX, as had previously been the standard way to create them for mathematical papers.
While I'm all for such convenience tools, I thought HN would be the place to find sympathy for the idea behind tikz-cd and its predecessors like xypic, that it's easier to write code that can be easily reproduced and programmatically manipulated than it is to try to draw (by hand, or with something like xfig), which was previously to that the standard. I guess preferences are cyclical!
Sure, no knock on the tool; it's good for people to choose where they want to spend their technical understanding. Just funny to be old enough to have seen some cycles firsthand.
While I'm all for such convenience tools, I thought HN would be the place to find sympathy for the idea behind tikz-cd and its predecessors like xypic, that it's easier to write code that can be easily reproduced and programmatically manipulated than it is to try to draw (by hand, or with something like xfig), which was previously to that the standard. I guess preferences are cyclical!