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The future of education is plain text

simplystatistics.org

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Re: The future of education is plain text

#141

Post by confounded »

Pxtl wrote: post #25
krapht wrote: post #2

Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.

This. My wife is a math teacher, and the piss-poor experience of writing mathematical notation outside of MS Word keeps them stuck on Word. As much as she and I love LaTeX's math notation, she can't get her departmentmates onboard with that kind of syntax. They need to maintain notes, guides, tests, quizzes, etc. and basically running a team OneDrive is really the only option because all the alternatives utterly fail…

> piss-poor experience of writing mathematical notation outside of MS Word

Mind blown. I only write a little math, and I can't imagine my first choice not being MathJax/LaTex in a plain text file.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#142

Post by microcolonel »

Sreyanth wrote: post #131

The future of education might be plain text, but not for the reasons mentioned in the article. Also, I think something can be the future of XYZ if it solves the problems XYZ face currently. The current content for education is good, but is definitely bandwidth-heavy and is tough to maintain. But dropping to plain text will force us let go a few things that otherwise make learning more effective. I think HTML (or a WY…

The problem is the lack of agreement on how to apply styles. Some tools do inline, some build stylesheets which use name mangling to format pretty names for CSS classes.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#144

Post by paultopia »

Pxtl wrote: post #25
krapht wrote: post #2

Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.

This. My wife is a math teacher, and the piss-poor experience of writing mathematical notation outside of MS Word keeps them stuck on Word. As much as she and I love LaTeX's math notation, she can't get her departmentmates onboard with that kind of syntax. They need to maintain notes, guides, tests, quizzes, etc. and basically running a team OneDrive is really the only option because all the alternatives utterly fail…

Ugh ugh ugh no.

Storytime. A couple years ago, I was in the midst of copyedits on a book with a bunch of math in it. The copyeditors were using a different version of Word.

When they sent the edits back to me, the math was gone. Completely.

Not only that, but when I tried to copy-paste the math in from a prior draft, the Word file refused to save.

Eventually, I had to reconstruct every one of the damn things, by hand.

(Happy consequence: I caught and corrected an error doing so. But still!)

That would never happen in a plain text format. And this was the experience that made me abandon word processors for good.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#145

Post by nategri »

doublerebel wrote: post #67

Plain text: so that no one can own the presentation method. Plain text: so that no one can own the distribution method. Plain text: so that no one can own the creation method. Plain text: so normal people can recover data even when partially corrupted. Plain text: so you aren't forced to see jarring ads. Plain text: so that there are no tracking pixels. Plain text: because connecting information with hyperlinks doesn…

Started with a Stallman-esque rant I could get down with and then ended in a very un-Stallman-esque and opaque ad. :(

Re: The future of education is plain text

#146

Post by abritinthebay »

coldtea wrote: post #123
serhei wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Org format is great, but the designs of many of its more advanced features rely heavily on the Emacs editor's ability to collapse metadata. Once you've built a file that uses drawers, tags, some spreadsheets, and several levels of nesting, the resulting file can be too cluttered with metadata to be easily understandable in other plaintext editors.

Not using those other editors is an added benefit.

Using emacs is a giant drawback however.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#147

Post by microcolonel »

com2kid wrote: post #94
Pxtl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. My wife is a math teacher, and the piss-poor experience of writing mathematical notation outside of MS Word keeps them stuck on Word. As much as she and I love LaTeX's math notation, she can't get her departmentmates onboard with that kind of syntax. They need to maintain notes, guides, tests, quizzes, etc. and basically running a team OneDrive is really the only option because all the alternatives utterly fail…

Fun fact! Microsoft Office has two internal math formats, one of them is Ecma Math[0], the other the other is the "Unicode Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics"[1], it is a Unicode standard and uses only Unicode standard characters. It has the unfortunate property of being hard to type on its own (the integral character isn't on most people's keyboards), but it is pretty easy to read as just plain text. If you c…

It's alright, somebody has to do it first. Though you shouldn't be surprised that a specification written by an employee at Microsoft is still primarily implemented at Microsoft.

Maybe it could be integrated into the Unicode shaper (HarfBuzz/Uniscribe/AAT) with a language code for "maths".

Re: The future of education is plain text

#148

Post by textmode »

https://www.simplystatistics.org/2016/04/20/data-repositorie...

Users want direct links and CSV.

(my note: prefereably the CSV data should split into small, manageable segments not one enormous file that will cause most software to choke; users can concatenate these segments themselves if they want larger files - catenating is easier than splitting!)

Re: The future of education is plain text

#149

Post by confounded »

minimaxir wrote: post #50

Odd to see a statistics-focused site to emphasize plain text as opposed to formats that promote usability/reproducibility like Notebooks such as Jupyter (or R Notebooks, as discussed last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14522795 ) The post correctly notes that R Markdown files are plain text, but the benefits of such (version control) are not discussed by the OP.

What are the possible benefits of doing something that could be done using plaintext, using a JSON blob?

Re: The future of education is plain text

#150

Post by confounded »

agentgt wrote: post #87

I have not really found a viable plain text version to Excel that normal users can use. I have done some Excel like tasks with R, Python (pandas, and various other python sci libraries) and even SQL (postgres) but it seems its either a programming language (R, python) or a data format (csv). I have been meaning to look into what alternatives are out there.

R/Python scripts are 100% plain text. iPython notebooks are not.
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