Yes, it's not the fastest ssg; there's Zola for that. However, digging git history with `git log --follow` can take a moment, and the MathJaX server-side rendering takes 10 seconds on a math-heavy site. However, incremental builds are the default, and a full-rebuild is seldom necessary. What makes it beautiful is the following:

1. You don't have a metadata header, like in most SSGs; timestamp is picked out from git-history, and topics/subtopics is simply picked out from the folder structure.

2. The syntax is terse, and features like un-numbered lists is excluded on purpose, because mathematicians like to number or letter everything.

3. The implementation of claytext is simple. There is no complicated markdown-processing, and even hard-wrapped lines are not allowed.

4. There's a dedicated vscode extension for auto-completing MathJaX. It also triggers a build-on-save, so you can just save changes in vscode and refresh the browser to see the changes.

5. Server-side rendering of math, so that the client isn't burdened with executing heavy javascript. It actually uses a custom fork of XyJaX to achieve this for commutative diagrams.

Websites are largely a visual medium so when you use the word beautiful most people are going to assume you're describing the visual aspects of the sites the tool generates, not the tool itself. And I get that beauty is subjective, but when you give terseness and arbitrary lack of features such as unnumbered lists as reasons for why it's beautiful, it's a little strange.

Beauty being subjective, it’s best left to others to describe the project as beautiful rather than the author. Like the difference between someone saying “I’m beautiful” vs having someone else describe them as beautiful, that comes across as a lack of humility in most contexts no matter how true it is. I think that may be why so many here including myself find it off-putting.

Yeah, besides beauty being quite subjective, mentioning beauty as the primary differentiator gives the impression that utility is less of a focus. In today’s environment where there’s an abundance of new software lacking depth and maturity, promoting the “beauty” (whatever that is) of a product is more often an indicator of just that.

> Shouldn't the first adjective be something related to what math users would value?

“Beauty” is very important to mathematicians. Check out the Wikipedia article on the subject:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty

but not this kind of beauty. first sentence of the linked wiki

>Mathematical beauty is the aesthetic pleasure typically derived from the abstractness, purity, simplicity, depth or orderliness of mathematics.

not of the type setting of mathematics (that's just regular plain old aesthetical beauty).

perhaps more relevant is how knuth literally took a decade off from writing his books to write a better typesetting system.

I think it is okay in this instance as it relates to an output generator (and beautiful output should be a key functionality of such a tool)

The problem is hyperbole. "Handsome" or "highly-readable" would be more apt.

Looking at the blog post on linear algebra, the line spacing seems a bit jammed in the presence of the inlined math.

> What exactly makes Clayoven beautiful?

It's written by a Ruby dev? :P

Indeed, one does not see open source java projects self promoting as “beautiful”, nor many others languages (Python jinga?). Reasonable to assert the Use/misuse of the adjective based on that imo.