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


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Massimiliano Gubinelli <address@hidden>
  • To: Giovanni Piredda <address@hidden>
  • Cc: Amir Michail <address@hidden>, address@hidden
  • Subject: Re: [TeXmacs] An emergency latex mode for unexpected PhD advisor visits?
  • Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2019 23:50:38 +0200
Hi all,

> On 1. Jun 2019, at 23:00, Giovanni Piredda <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
>
> 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
>


I feel not useful to sell something as “superior” (wrt. to what Amir was
saying). TeXmacs has advantages and disadvantages wrt. LaTeX. All we can help
people to do is to fairly assess what are the real advantages of LaTeX and
help them feel what are the real disadvantages.

From my experience, LaTeX users become “unaware” of all the negative sides of
their tool and they take a very intricate routine as a normal procedure. And
when you get into a routine, then is difficult to get away, to learn new
tools and make yourself familiar with their idiosyncrasies.

So for example, the concept of “structured editor” is not very common and
people are not familiar with it. But one is one of the great features of
TeXmacs, which somehow make it unique. It allows you to edit a structured
document without getting too much in your way. But this is unusual to people
used to edit a text file where the editor does not impose any structure on
you. So users feels a barrier which we cannot do anything about it, since it
is a barrier given by a wrong conception of what the editor should do.

But overall I do not think these things are keeping the users away. In my
opinion there is the feeling that TeXmacs is not mainstream, so people are
not keen to spend energy to learn it. They feel that, if there are not many
people using it there should be a reason. It does not look like things you
are used too, so maybe it is wrongly designed, is not powerful enough, is not
stable enough, is not good for your specific task, lacking this feature or
this other, etc...

If you are not able to do something in LaTeX you feel its your fault (maybe
because somebody told you that TeX is Turing complete), if you are not able
to do something in TeXmacs, then its Joris’ fault. :)

So I do not think is mainly a technological problem or the lack of this or
this other feature, but is a problem of perception.

After many years of discussing always the same questions and never coming up
with convincing answers, all TeXmacs' developers go back to silence and to do
what is more funny: implement new features and iron away old bugs.

Best
mg






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