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I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#81

Post by samatman »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #44
politician wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree. Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread.

No, its definitely relevant. Hands were not designed with any specific function in mind. There was not evolutionary pressure to "throw rocks at the eye of a mammoth" Did orangutans evolve hands to throw rocks at mammoths? No, they did not The parent comment is making ridiculous claims without evidence https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-do-orangutans-eat.h...

You've smoothly shot right past solid ground (evolution doesn't design things) to a fairly wild claim (rock-throwing apes didn't experience evolutionary pressure to get better at throwing rocks).

Orangutans aren't humans, so what are you saying, apes which don't throw rocks to kill their prey don't... throw rocks to kill their prey?

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#82

Post by whimsicalism »

MrVandemar wrote: post #37
Pinus wrote: post #6

You sometimes see people ask fairly simple Python questions on Stack Overflow, that could be solved by five lines of plain Python, and be answered with some Pandas magic incantation that happens to do what they want with one call. I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts, replacing it by a search for the right magic thing from a box of…

Yes! Plain python is almost always crystal clear and self explanatory. But "idiomatic python" which people seem to compete to be "more idiomatic than thou" is none of these things. It's actually a barrier to learning the language.

Idiomatic python is slow. Trying to convert everything into the mini-DSL that a C implemented library can understand is oftentimes considerably faster.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#83

Post by bernulli »

tomrod wrote: post #35
netizen-936824 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"

I'd go so far to say that linguistically nature is the antithesis of artificial (made by hands). Avoiding silly theological tropes, evolution is often mistakenly referred to as a designer when it's just an emergent property of competing, replicating agents. People don't normally bother with precision though, so we are where we are.

I always like to see it the other way around, it eliminates entities that are not a good fit, and the remainder is what drives adaptation. Of course, people could argue that's just like Michelangelo [1], and we're back at 'designed'.

[1] “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#84

Post by sph »

wesleywt wrote: post #78

Having written my thesis in LaTex, I can say it is wonderful and a wonderful waste of time.

Same, I just did my resume in LaTeX, it's such an obtuse and painful tool, yet nothing even comes close to the control it gives you.

Hey btw, I'm looking for contract work! https://github.com/1player/resume/blob/master/resume.pdf

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#85

Post by doliveira »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #44
politician wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree. Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread.

No, its definitely relevant. Hands were not designed with any specific function in mind. There was not evolutionary pressure to "throw rocks at the eye of a mammoth" Did orangutans evolve hands to throw rocks at mammoths? No, they did not The parent comment is making ridiculous claims without evidence https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-do-orangutans-eat.h...

I think you're assigning too much weight to the word itself. In informal settings, or even quasi-formal ones, it's not uncommon to use "designed" when we don't mean "literally designed".

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#86

Post by flenserboy »

ProfXponent wrote: post #11

What is the intended use for LaTex these days? I’m not trying to flame, I just have no idea why anyone would choose to use it over html/css or just a word processor.

Laying out books. The fact that all of this can be done in a text file, without hidden codes and being tied to this file format or another, is extraordinary. Images are easily handled, fonts simply work (XeTeX & friends work well for me), and — with sufficient warnings — these files can be handed over to an author and edited without messing much, if anything, up. The PDFs generated work well with all the PDF tools I've attempted to use on them, and there's none of the weirdness that too-often shows up in Word or other WPs. If all you want is good-looking text, generated from truly basic documents, it will give it to you without effort.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#87

Post by officehero »

ahmadmijot wrote: post #65

I don't use LateX explicitly (my colleagues and supervisors didn't know LaTeX and exclusively use MS Word) but I like how I can write equation in MS Word using LateX notations.

Same. I'm a PhD student in CS and manage just fine with embedded latex in word documents and a reference plugin (I use zotero). There's definitely pros/cons. Imo biggest con is the absence of something like overleaf and biggest pro is ease of use.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#88

Post by graycat »

LaTeX? I just use TeX. The documentation for TeX is clear, very precise, and much shorter.

LaTeX is just TeX but with a lot of new macros. The intent is different: With TeX, you just say in detail what steps you want the software to do. With LaTeX you say what you want in general terms and f'get about the details.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#89

Post by Tepix »

In the last three decades of having the opportunity to learn and use TeX, i have managed to avoid it. In the same time i've helped a friend with word processing for her dissertation. I'm still not sure how we managed to get it to work with all the horror stories about data loss and Microsoft Word at the time. But it did its job and I'm still in the WYSIWYG camp.

Maybe in another life...

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#90

Post by netizen-936824 »

samatman wrote: post #81
netizen-936824 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, its definitely relevant. Hands were not designed with any specific function in mind. There was not evolutionary pressure to "throw rocks at the eye of a mammoth" Did orangutans evolve hands to throw rocks at mammoths? No, they did not The parent comment is making ridiculous claims without evidence https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-do-orangutans-eat.h...

You've smoothly shot right past solid ground (evolution doesn't design things) to a fairly wild claim (rock-throwing apes didn't experience evolutionary pressure to get better at throwing rocks). Orangutans aren't humans, so what are you saying, apes which don't throw rocks to kill their prey don't... throw rocks to kill their prey?

Perhaps my example is poor, but it shows that hands are not coupled to predation

I'm specifically talking about the evolution of hands, humans are not the only organism with hands.

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