Hi Timothy,
Quoting Timothy Rice <t.r...@ms.unimelb.edu.au> on Thu, 5 May 2016
07:28:51 +1000:
Are training wheels on a bike "all wrong"?
To a beginner, training wheels also seem to have points of superiority; yet
we expect that as time goes on, the novice will discard the training
wheels. This is both a display of increased skill, and a prerequisite for
using the bike more effectively overall.
But maybe when even all the adults use training wheels too, and they can't
imagine a bike without training wheels, this state of affairs would hold
people back from using the bike to its full potential. It might even turn
out that anyone who does take the initiative of discarding training wheels
would seem like a freak who has to justify themselves to others. They might
find themselves responding to claims that training wheels aren't "all
wrong" ;)
And, you know, one of the things I emphasise at the start when teaching
LaTeX is that it is contraindicated for small, uncomplicated projects that
don't have special typesetting requirements. If someone is just writing a
letter to their grandma, they might wish to stick with their conventional
word processor, it's no skin off my nose.
However, one would hope that in academia, the researcher aspires to create
non-trivial documents; certainly many people who have tried writing a
thesis in Word later came to lament their choice.
Yes, I'm one of them!
Are Word and PowerPoint "all wrong"? Maybe not. But should we be content
with software whose main claim to fame is that they're not all wrong and
they happen to be used by a lot of people who refuse to discard training
wheels?
The "training wheels" analogy does not hold. Word and PowerPoint are
not designed for beginners only. They are powerful document
preparation tools in their own right.
My point was that Word and PowerPoint are not "all wrong" nor are they
"all right". They have strengths and weaknesses, as does LaTeX (great
for formulae!). Statements that can be perceived as fundamentalist
("all wrong") or patronising ("training wheels") when promoting one
tool over another does no favours and can be counter-productive. As an
example, I've seen attendees at a workshop ask if they can hold Word
docs under Git and, when told, "ideally you'd use plain-text documents
to get the most benefit", switch off entirely as their community used
Word, but when told "of course, you can put Word docs under Git", and
having been shown this (including how to do a simple conflict
resolution), brighten up again. I'd rather people be taught to
appreciate and be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of all the
tools they use, and, as Jan mentions, the technical debts they could
incur. This includes the tools currently used by SWC (which, in
future, people may wonder why we ever used some of them - a colleague
recently railed against using a closed source platform like GitHub,
for example)
cheers,
mike
Kind regards,
Tim
[1] https://github.com/cryptarch/latex-novice.git
As one who writes everything in MarkDown by preference, are Word and
PowerPoint "all wrong"? Yes, their binary formats don't play so well
with revision control than plain-text formats such as MarkDown or
LaTeX, for example (but sticking them under revision control is
still of great benefit). In other ways they're superior: WYSIWYG
editors, no compilation steps, PDF-generation from within the tool,
and they're ubiquitous. Similarly, for some tasks they allow a user
to "do more in less time with less pain" than the alternatives*.
cheers,
mike
* Having spent more than the 5 minutes it should have taken
yesterday trying (and failing even with Google's help) to put a
hyperlink to a Wikipedia page with multiple underscores in a LaTeX
document and have it clickable in the resulting PDF.
------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael (Mike) Jackson m.jack...@epcc.ed.ac.uk
Software Architect Tel: +44 (0)131 650 5141
EPCC, The University of Edinburgh http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk
Software Sustainability Institute http://www.software.ac.uk
------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael (Mike) Jackson m.jack...@epcc.ed.ac.uk
Software Architect Tel: +44 (0)131 650 5141
EPCC, The University of Edinburgh http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk
Software Sustainability Institute http://www.software.ac.uk
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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