Who were the opponents of Lisp?
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From: Tim Bradshaw on 26 Apr 2010 16:54 On 2010-04-09 19:50:34 +0100, Xah Lee said: > LOL. If you use Mathematica, for any complex math formula, it > trivially beat TeX/LaTeX. In fact, for complex formula, you won't even > known how to do it with TeX unless you are like one of the world's top > TeX expert. Coincidentally, I just wrote a non-trivial amount of reasonably maths-dense text in Mathematica (something around 15 pages of notes to help someone with final-year school mechanics, so not a book, but 5 or 10 % of one), and the printed output just makes me cringe, it's so bad. I probably am rather fussy - I spent several years being very interested in typography and especially mathematical typography - but it really isn't good. Of course a lot of things *are* good - being able to draw pictures using a term-based language is really nice (though it needs automatic positioning of labels), and the whole integration thing is really good, but for printed output (or PDF), yuck. Of course, I imagine from other articles you've written you'll say that this is because several hundred years of history should all be thrown out and we should all start from some typographic year zero in which people like me will be purged.
From: Xah Lee on 27 Apr 2010 06:47 On Apr 26, 1:54Â pm, Tim Bradshaw <t...(a)tfeb.org> wrote: > On 2010-04-09 19:50:34 +0100, Xah Lee said: > > > LOL. If you use Mathematica, for any complex math formula, it > > trivially beat TeX/LaTeX. In fact, for complex formula, you won't even > > known how to do it with TeX unless you are like one of the world's top > > TeX expert. > > Coincidentally, I just wrote a non-trivial amount of reasonably > maths-dense text in Mathematica (something around 15 pages of notes to > help someone with final-year school mechanics, so not a book, but 5 or > 10 % of one), and the printed output just makes me cringe, it's so bad. > Â I probably am rather fussy - I spent several years being very > interested in typography and especially mathematical typography - but > it really isn't good. by bad, do you mean esthetically? e.g. like jagged, or something similar to courier vs serif? Unfortunately, i really haven't used Mathematica for the past 5 years. Don't have the latest Mathematica since 2000. If you can do a screenshot of it, that'd be great. > Of course a lot of things *are* good - being able to draw pictures > using a term-based language is really nice (though it needs automatic > positioning of labels), and the whole integration thing is really good, > but for printed output (or PDF), yuck. correct me if i'm wrong, but i think you do mean esthetically. Namely, typography proper and layout, as opposed to functional esthetics of layout out of math formulas and structure (for lack of better term). To describe what i mean by that, for examples: the doc produced by typewriter would be esthetically bad compared to laser printed with Times font. Doc produced by Microsoft Word compared to professionally produced PDF with all latest fonts and embedded, plain text shown emacs as compared to well-designed formatted text in HTML and CSS. 1990's html 2 vs html 4 with css today. Scanned book page vs the same page printed from LaTeX source code. for those who don't know Mathematica, here's a formula gallery from Mathematica 5.2, released in 2005. http://documents.wolfram.com/mathematica/Demos/FormulaGallery/ (i didn't find the latest version's formula gallery in few secs of web search) here's a page of Mathematica's typesetting http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/MathematicalTypesetting.html > Of course, I imagine from other articles you've written you'll say that > this is because several hundred years of history should all be thrown > out and we should all start from some typographic year zero in which > people like me will be purged. something like that. lol. Xah â http://xahlee.org/ â
From: Nicolas Neuss on 27 Apr 2010 10:48 Xah Lee <xahlee(a)gmail.com> writes: > On Apr 26, 1:54�pm, Tim Bradshaw <t...(a)tfeb.org> wrote: >> On 2010-04-09 19:50:34 +0100, Xah Lee said: >> >> > LOL. If you use Mathematica, for any complex math formula, it >> > trivially beat TeX/LaTeX. In fact, for complex formula, you won't >> > even known how to do it with TeX unless you are like one of the >> > world's top TeX expert. > > [...] > > Unfortunately, i really haven't used Mathematica for the past 5 > years. Don't have the latest Mathematica since 2000. Priceless:-) Xah, you really are the king of trolls! Respectfully, Nicolas
From: Tim Bradshaw on 27 Apr 2010 11:50
On 2010-04-27 11:47:56 +0100, Xah Lee said: > by bad, do you mean esthetically? e.g. like jagged, or something > similar to courier vs serif? I do mean aesthetically, but not at that level. The spacing is bad, and it changes type size when it shouldn't (for insance in fractions it is choosing smaller type, even in displayed maths). It's probably at least as good as Word or something would do (and it seems better than what Firefox does with MathML, say), but it's nowhere near TeX. > > Unfortunately, i really haven't used Mathematica for the past 5 > years. Don't have the latest Mathematica since 2000. If you can do a > screenshot of it, that'd be great. I'm not sure I can - obviously I *technically* can, but I have the hobbyist license and I'm not sure what that lets me do, but I suspect it may not include distributing output. I'll check and see what it says. Don't get me wrong BTW - though I whine about Mathematica, it's a great tool for people who want to tinker like me, just not for everything. |