# Programming Languages in the Wild
1) For discussion, you chose the programming language: TikZ ist _kein_ Zeichenprogramm
(Does GitHub's MarkDown support italicizing a single letter within a word?

2) This language is: Domain Specific

3) Is this language Turing complete?:  Yes..?

## Uses 
4) For what killer app, projects, or historical reason is this language best known or used ?: 
TikZ is best known for its ability to make high-quality diagrams in LaTeX. It is
a LaTeX package that allows authors to describe their desired images without the
need for a WYSIWYG editor.

5) Is the answer to 4, which the language is known for, due to language features, community support or libraries, or something else?:
TikZ is one of the only LaTex libraries that allows authors to make diagrams
directly within their files. There's no need to create the image externally and
import it. (Many of the other LaTeX libraries are built on top of TikZ.) Because
of this unique ability, there are tons of users, making it relatively easy to
get support on StackOverflow. Also, because it is the de-facto tool for this,
several additional libraries have been written for it for people who have an
even more specific niche they wish to use it for.

6) As a programmer, what is easy to do in the language?:
It is easy to draw shapes by specifying coordinates for line segments and cubic
Bezier curves. Using some of the more common libraries, many types of diagrams
become easy as well, like finite-state automata, trees, and other finite graphs.
As all the graphics are vector-based, affine transformations like rotating,
scaling, and shifting are also simple for the programmer to use.

7) What does the method to do the answer to 6 look like in general purpose languages like c or java?:
Oof. I don't know how to make decent diagrams in either C or Java; if I'm using
one of those languages, I'm usally outputting a text file that I'm going to run
through pdflatex. I have made output images in C# before, and it was all bitmap
manipulation: if I had a complicated thing and I wanted to scale it up, I had to
hope I'd already defined all the coordinates in terms of some `scale` variable,
or else I'd be stuck editing each and every line to change each part of the
images.

8) Does the programmer have to give up anything to gain the benefits of this language?:
Well, as the only current implementation of TikZ is a LaTeX package, the
programmer pretty much has to learn two languages to use TikZ. TikZ does not
follow many of the conventions of LaTeX, so it's far more daunting than most
packages are. As a package in LaTeX, there is no such thing as a local variable,
which often encourages programmers to avoid using variables when feasible, to
prevent cluttering the global scope. Also, LaTeX is missing several things
from more general purpose languages, like subroutines and arrays (not counting
experiemental LaTeX3). The last time I wanted to use an array, it was purely as
a joke/experiement, and I wound up using a cons list from the Lambda package.
(The fact that TeX is Turing Complete is only obvious once realising that
lambda-calculus is Turing Complete.) Oh, and the global variables are all either
strings or integers, without any real way to combine multiple pieces of
information into a larger unit.