Hi Freek,
On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 5:32 AM, Freek Wiedijk <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Cris,
>
> >I was speaking from a software engineering and usability
> >point of view.
>
> Okay, just to fix our minds: would you consider Knuth's/
> Lamport's latex to be "usable" in this sense? Because I
> would strongly claim that it is. It's one of the most
> usable systems I know.
>
Thanks for asking! Usability is not an absolute, it is relative to the user
and the purpose. I'm glad you find latex usable as well as useful.
Consider how people may come to use LaTeX. If you are an academic you may
have a strong motivation to prepare papers for publication. If that means
investing time and effort to learn LaTeX, you may be willing. If your
colleagues use it and recommend it, if some conferences or publishers
require it, all of that might reinforce your readiness to adopt it. If you
like the payoff, you tend to find it usable.
First-time usability can be crucial for adoption of technology that users
aren't very convinced that they need or want. (For proof assistants I think
this might be 99.99% of potential users.) If the potential user tries it
and gets an immediate feeling of success, he or she is likely to take
another step. Otherwise most potential users quit and don't come back
unless maybe a friend starts gushing about how great it is. Then maybe they
will give it one more try. If the product passes the user's first "sniff
test", the user still wants to feel that bits of additional effort will pay
off nicely too.
Most potential users of a new tool such as a proof assistant have some
other known path toward his or her goal -- pencil and paper or a whiteboard
for proofs or problem solving; testing for software development;
computational approximations for engineering. The cost of learning to use
this proof assistant thing might be high, and the payoff is uncertain.
People have lots of other things to do. So the tool had better make a very
good first impression. That is my view, and I think it's a pretty standard
view on this sort of thing by people who worry about technology adoption.
Maybe this is old news to you, but if so I think it's still worth saying.
Best regards,
Cris
>
> That's why I think that Mark's focus on things like error
> messages and concrete syntax is missing the point. Latex is
> pretty horrible in that respect, but _that doesn't matter._
>
> Freek
>
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