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Re: [TeXmacs] An emergency latex mode for unexpected PhD advisor visits?


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Giovanni Piredda <address@hidden>
  • To: Amir Michail <address@hidden>
  • Cc: address@hidden
  • Subject: Re: [TeXmacs] An emergency latex mode for unexpected PhD advisor visits?
  • Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2019 23:00:32 +0200


Am 01.06.2019 um 22:22 schrieb Amir Michail:

People in academia care more about appearances than being correct about the
superiority of a tool. They don’t want to jeopardize important academic
connections.

Marketing TeXmacs as “forbidden fruit” and providing an emergency LaTeX
editing mode might get it more attention among academics.

Amir


Hi again,

I am not convinced of the basis of your argument ("People in academia care more about appearances than being correct about the superiority of a tool ") but you and I could have different experiences. Let us admit for the sake of the argument that things are as you say. In this case my feelings would be against helping people who have this problem: let them sort it out by themselves.

I agree on another thing that is implicit in your message (and in other messages that you write before if I recall well): it is necessary to figure out what is hampering the diffusion of TeXmacs. I expect developers to have a bit of a collection of reasons given to them by people on why they prefer LaTeX to TeXmacs. I guess that one is that LaTeX is established, and TeXmacs is not; so when you have to write an article or a thesis, with LaTeX you are guaranteed that you have what you need (with TeXmacs you have to figure it out first).

From my point of view, I know what I would like to have: a system to do structured writing where I can easily read what I am writing. Moreover, I would like to have it programmable (and extensible) with a language that is easy to grasp at first sight; and made so that different packages can easily be compatible with each other. Finally, when it fails it should issue error messages that can help you find the problem with your input.
With TeXmacs it is possible to read what you are writing while you are writing it, so that is very good. I am trying to gather a bit of experience in programming it, I do not know yet enough to have an opinion on this aspect of things.

Giovanni




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