131–140 of 247 posts
Why do you want to hurt yourself typing TeX on a virtual keyboard? If you consider to add a real keyboard to your ipad then you should better get serious and use a Macbook, Linux or Windows.
Hear, hear! This post provides a perfect example of the utter failure of software engineering in the real world. I am reminded of it every time I try to install software, with all the ridiculous dependencies and multiple versions. Instead of addressing the serious foundational issues facing software development and architecture, the geniuses are busy inventing the latest, greatest programming language, creating even…
There is some truth in your microrant here. I would restate it like this: Instead of getting excited with how expressive is a new sexy multi-injection functional language when you write the nth Fibonacci sequence, I would think it more realist and constructive to get excited with how a new language or a new extension of an existing language allow to handle module and package dependencies in a clean, safe and explicit way.
It resonates also with my work today: I spend a few hours removing those evil "import *" from our codebase... (Python's "we are grownups" mantra is nice, but I think a piece of the quote is missing: "we are grownups, thus we run pylint and comply to all the rules, except a few carefully chosen ones")
The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility. If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free. A new implementation will certainly not be. Joel Spolsky said it very well http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I disagree that the current situation is LaTeX developers' fault. TeX and LaTeX are complex pieces of…
"""The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility.""" Yeah. The only benefit is a codebase that reflects current needs and can grow in new directions and follow current practices, that programmers of today are familiar with. And also be faster, and more flexible. But what are those compared to compatibility right? (Of course people interested in pure compatibility could just continue to use the ol…
How are either of those requirements wrong? I certainly expect my programs to be bug free. LaTeX is a tool that's older than many GNU utilities. It's been reviewed and tested numerous times over by the harshest test suite of all: the real world.
Yes, in theory, you could rewrite TeX to be cleaner, while maintaining backwards compatibility and lack of bugs and regressions. In practice, this is very very hard. It's so hard that no one, no individual or company has managed to pull it off.
But hey, who knows? You could be the first. The LaTeX codebase is open-source. If you think you can pull off what the most talented software engineers in the world haven't been able to do, go right ahead.
Wouldn't it be possible to just write a front end for the iPad, and run a LaTeX service in the cloud? I think this would be by far the easiest way to do it, and I don't think it's really optimal to do all the LaTeX stuff client-side on limited hardware and battery anyway.
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You could use a virtual machine library (if anything suitable exists) and run everything inside one executable - it would probably have horrid performance but you get rid of the single binary restriction. You can put on a nice front-end and tell the user how much longer he has to wait until the operation is complete.
Virtual machines are generally prohibited by the guidelines as well. (Exceptions exist for things like script interpreters, which need to be present for some games to run, e.g. Lua.)
To get around it, you'd have to make it In App Purchases, because these also come from a the App Store.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Virtual machines are generally prohibited by the guidelines as well. (Exceptions exist for things like script interpreters, which need to be present for some games to run, e.g. Lua.)
I never understood the exception for game engines (ala Lua). Why are those okay but other VMs not okay (from Apple's perspective, of course)?
I don't know, maybe the author is trying to do something with the iPad which is simply not supposed to do. The iPad is beautiful, pleasant to use etc. but writing a book on the iPad is maybe not the things one does. I use my tablet to write — quite a lot — way slower than on my regular keyboard, but with time to think. Everything is in text files, synced to my desktop where the typesetting is really performed. Writin…
I understand that tablets are a wonderfully portable device but you can't expect to get 100% desktop functionality. Sometimes you have to find the limit of your software/hardware.
I don't own an iPad, but is there git or the like? If so syncing and keeping track of changes would be simple.