On 1/24/07, Attila Kinali <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 11:59:30 +0000
Dieter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> C is extremely common. Most Unix systems come with at least one C compiler.
> LaTeX is nowhere near as common as C. More like Haskell or APL.
I don't know anyone who knows Haskell, i've never heard of APL.
I know a whole office full of people who use Haskell as their primary
development language.
Nope. Latex is _not_ a documentation system.
What you mean is texinfo and that's an abdomination
that should have been never invented (sorry, personal opinion).
I've never been able to figure out that stupid "info" replacement to
man pages. And after studying HCI and cognitive engineering, I'm
getting progressively less tolerant of user interfaces whose controls
are not intuitive. They thought Info was going to be an improvement,
but it's functionally a step backwards. I've never been able to
figure out how to reliably go "back" from a document I just took a
link to, nor can I figure out how to exit "help" back to whatever it
is that I was reading. And don't bother telling me. I don't care.
It has all sorts of useless functions for moving to the next or a
previous word while managing to hide everything you need to navigate!
The enduser will not care about these documents anyways.
They are meant for developers. And i very much expect
a developer to be able to install latex if he hasn't already.
I got my CSE degree in 1996. I've been programming C since 1988. I
got my first computer in 1981. I didn't know anything about LaTeX
until last September, and I wasn't functional in it until the end of
November 2006. On top of that, it was not particularly obvious to me
how to use the Linux (TeTeX) tools (I had to ask friends for help),
and there are all sorts of bugs in them (at least in the Ubuntu
packages). I would really rather not burden a busy hardware engineer
with this. I like LaTeX. I do my homework in it, because I find it
easier to layout and edit a document with mathematical equations than
to write it by hand (legibly anyhow). I think LaTeX is awesome. But
it is by no means something I consider to be a required staple of
Computer Science (like C). The reason I chose to write these
documents in LaTeX is that I want to make things easier. Forcing
others to use LaTeX doesn't make things easier.
--
Timothy Miller
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti
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