I take a practical approach. I use simple programs when they do the job well, and more complex programs when they get the job done better. Sometimes a simple program can be useful for certain jobs, such as ones involving shell scripting, whereas a complex program may be more useful for example in other applications, such as using Solidworks for engineering work. LaTeX is certainly a bloated monstrosity, but the damn thing is useful for a lot of different tasks.
People on this email list tend to go to an extreme in favoring simplicity above all else, which is why they release dumpster fires like the ST terminal emulator for example which has absolutely no features at all, is riddled with bugs and compatibility problems, and requires extensive patching to add in any useful features. The developers are also basement-dwelling losers, total raging assholes who take personal offense to the suggestion that their code should be better commented or that someone might fork the code to make an improved version. I tried ST for a time before realizing it was trash and just switched back to Xterm, the gold standard of functional X11 terminal emulators, which the ST developers talked shit about, calling "bloated" in their documentation, and saying the code wasn't good. Actually it is not bloated, the code quality is much higher than ST (and is actually commented!), It Just Works(TM), and it's noticeably faster as well when ST is patched with the juvenile "scrollback buffer support" implementation--which calls malloc() once for every line(!) of the scrollback buffer. Take anything that a religious cult member says with a grain of salt. Dave
