Who were the opponents of Lisp?
in [Lisp]
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From: Xah Lee on 9 Apr 2010 14:37 On Mar 27, 10:41 am, Tim Bradshaw <t...(a)tfeb.org> wrote: > On 2010-03-27 17:06:13 +0000, His kennyness said: > > > It took him ten years just to lay out type > > To be fair, I think he basically had to discover how typography works, > including mathematical typography, invent algorithms that could do a > decent job of it, implement them and (not least) design a typeface (OK, > a horrible typeface, but I think he was constrained by the typeface his > publisher had already used) and write a program in which to implement > that design. > > That's actually pretty good going for ten years. > > > TeX is notoriously hard to mark up, > > TeX is indeed a horrible language > > > and there is no wysiwyg GUI. > > People who can type generally don't want such.  Though TeX is horrible, > it is still a pretty good way of creating printed maths - certainly far > better than anything else I've seen. > > (None of this should be taken as implying I think Knuth has anything > interesting to say about programming languages: I don't.) certainly i disagree. See: ⢠The TeX Pestilence http://xahlee.org/cmaci/notation/TeX_pestilence.html as to better tools for showing math formulas... there are quite a few today that are not based on TeX. MathML, TeXmacs, Lout ... you can find a lot more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_editor Xah â http://xahlee.org/ â
From: Xah Lee on 9 Apr 2010 14:50 On Mar 31, 12:55Â am, Nicolas Neuss <lastn...(a)kit.edu> wrote: > Tim Bradshaw <t...(a)tfeb.org> writes: > > Of course TeX fails to capture the semantics of the expression at all, but > > I think that if you try and do that you likely end up with something you > > can't type quickly. Â And that does matter to people who are fluent with > > maths and typing - you want something which is not enormously slower than > > handwriting stuff. > > I think this is the most important point. Â It would probably be very > amusing to see a competition in math typing speed between someone > proficient in TeX (who is additionally using a reasonable environment > like Emacs/AucTeX) and someone proficient in typing math in Word or > similar (are there such people at all?). > > OTOH, if you use TeX/LaTeX only rarely, the overhead is large. Â And > learning LaTeX becomes masochism, if you are not really trained in > structured thinking and/or programming, and you have noone at hand who > sets you straight if you maltreat it as a WYSIWYG system. > > Nicolas 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. When most tech geekers speaks of âi use TeX...â, their formula amounts to the likes of quadraic formula, matrixes, derivatives, integrals, square roots, powers... the type of math typesetting you see in common math books. When the thing needs to be typeset gets a bet exotic, such as continued fractions, or bunch of arrows in category theory..., it gets very hard to know how to do in TeX. TeX and LaTeX survived this long for mainly one reason: $Free$. (just like lots of garbage from the open source thing, and beore this, X11, unix. First they spam by $free$, then they become the recognized industry âstandardâ, by this time, they killed most quality things out there, then they try to fix the problems... e.g. Apache, MySQL, ... ) Xah â http://xahlee.org/ â
From: Xah Lee on 9 Apr 2010 14:54 On Apr 9, 2:17Â am, His kennyness <kentil...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > ps. What do the dinosaurs think of MathML? The typesetting, I mean. LOL. As far as i know, many mathematicians don't like it... cause it is too verbose to the degree that it is not possible to write manually, while many of these old mathematicians knows TeX already. Xah â http://xahlee.org/ â
From: Tim Bradshaw on 9 Apr 2010 17:06 On 2010-04-09 16:46:01 +0100, Harald Hanche-Olsen said: > + His kennyness <kentilton(a)gmail.com>: > >> Aha! jsMath!! You just changed my life. > > Then take a look at its successor-to-be: http://www.mathjax.org/ That looks interesting. I will have to work out how to embed it into TiddlyWiki.
From: Peter Keller on 9 Apr 2010 17:33
Xah Lee <xahlee(a)gmail.com> wrote: > These motherfucking idiotic scumbags. It is really tragic that the knowledge you are able to contribute to humanity is diluted by your vitriol. People are not going to remember you for the things you did. They are going to remember you for the things you said. Later, -pete |