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The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

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Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#161

Post by bh42222 »

atakan_gurkan wrote: post #10

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…

There's rewrites and there's rewrites. I think what Joel is against is the starting from scratch rewrite, I agree with him on this.

But I don't think Joel is against a slow, one line at a time, working on the old code base rewrite.

It is not clear what kind of re-write the OP is advocating. But I would be surprised if he is pro the start from scratch kind.

But it might be just my biased perception.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#162

Post by lukeschlather »

anghyflawn wrote: post #119
gizzlon wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, do you also lug around a keyboard for the ipad? Or do you actually type using the touchscreen? Maybe you just need a smaller laptop .. Also, terminals are great, but writing anything serious without X is a pain.

I use a ZaggMate which doubles as protection, weighs about the same as any other case and is not bulky at all. It works quite well. > Maybe you just need a smaller laptop .. No, I don't want to have a small laptop as my main computer. I had an Eee before the iPad, but the difference in the writing experience is not too different in the end and the other advantages of the iPad are greater. In any case, you can hardly…

I've got a dell mini running Ubuntu. I wouldn't recommend it due to a bug in the graphics drivers that causes a crash on resume from hibernate, but, it is a great machine and works perfectly for LaTeX.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#163

Post by podperson »

jen_h wrote: post #155

One real issue is that most users' LaTeX environments are highly customized and tweaked to our own liking. Even if it weren't absolutely nuts to put every-package-and-extension-known-to-man inside a iOS binary, it still wouldn't be right. Like, what if I want LaTeX2HTML (I've never not had to highly tweak this)? What about my snazzy custom fonts? That bibliography style that only one journal accepts and requires thes…

Sounds to me like a LaTeX App for iPad that offloaded page rendering to a server which also handled configuration would be a nice product. I'm guessing the market might not be large enough.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#164

Post by william42 »

gizzlon wrote: post #127
anghyflawn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a ZaggMate which doubles as protection, weighs about the same as any other case and is not bulky at all. It works quite well. > Maybe you just need a smaller laptop .. No, I don't want to have a small laptop as my main computer. I had an Eee before the iPad, but the difference in the writing experience is not too different in the end and the other advantages of the iPad are greater. In any case, you can hardly…

"Why? Emacs doesn't really need X.." Guess this depends on how you work. I often find myself starting many instances of the editor[1] which is a pain if you have to create a new ssh connection for each (or use ctrl-z etc). "the writing experience is not too different [..] the other advantages of the iPad are greater." Guess the real difference between us is that you see something great in the iPad, so you are willing…

I'm surprised that you don't use screen(or tmux, which I have yet to try out).

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#166

Post by swombat »

super_mario wrote: post #150
swombat wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right - that's why Apple released stuff like GarageBand, Pages, Keynote, Numbers and iMovie for the iPad - so that people would not use all this content-creation software to create content. Oh wait.

Yeah I have all those app on my iPhone 4. iMove is useful if I'm out and about and want to trim and upload a video to facebook etc (these apps should really be shipped with the OS), but that's far cry from actual work or real video editing. The other applications pages, numbers, keynote are severely limited, and really slow and difficult to use. They are OK for viewing documents created elsewhere, but not so much for…

The Isaacson biography states explicitly that Apple released those apps to counter the perception (which they disagreed with) that the iPad was for "consuming content only"...

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#167

Post by dextorious »

quanticle wrote: post #135
dextorious wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""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…

And your wrong assumption is a) that a problem has to be bug free to be useful or b) that a new effort can't produce a relatively bug free codebase? 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 coul…

"""How are either of those requirements wrong? I certainly expect my programs to be bug free."""

Good luck with that. What I said, though, was that "a problem has to be bug free to be useful" is a wrong assumption. We all use programs that have bugs, and still found them immensely useful.

"""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."""

What are you talking about? Tons of people have written TeX versions of their own, even in Lua, and most of those are widely used.

"""But hey, who knows? You could be the first."""

Hardly. There is LuaTex, XeTeX (even more widely used) and others. Are you just talking out of your ass? (Not to mention several other modern typesetting engines that are not TeX based. You make it sound like TeX is an impossible achievement).

Now, what I said I'd like to see was not a rewriting of TeX itself, but a modern version of a TeX like engine, with or without compatibility. Programs like XeTeX and Omega for example provide Unicode support and TTF/OT support to TeX, but I'd like to see something more modular, and with a more streamlined markup than TeX+LaTeX. While we're at it, even scriptable.

There are also some improvements found since in typesetting, like those employed in the InDesign layout engine concerning edge text and hyphenation.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#168

Post by gizzlon »

william42 wrote: post #164
gizzlon wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why? Emacs doesn't really need X.." Guess this depends on how you work. I often find myself starting many instances of the editor[1] which is a pain if you have to create a new ssh connection for each (or use ctrl-z etc). "the writing experience is not too different [..] the other advantages of the iPad are greater." Guess the real difference between us is that you see something great in the iPad, so you are willing…

I'm surprised that you don't use screen(or tmux, which I have yet to try out).

I don't have to :)

Well, ok, I use screen to detach irssi etc.. but not as a "window" manager

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#169

Post by jerf »

bh42222 wrote: post #161
atakan_gurkan wrote: post #10

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…

There's rewrites and there's rewrites. I think what Joel is against is the starting from scratch rewrite, I agree with him on this. But I don't think Joel is against a slow, one line at a time, working on the old code base rewrite. It is not clear what kind of re-write the OP is advocating. But I would be surprised if he is pro the start from scratch kind. But it might be just my biased perception.

It is also worth pointing out Joel says "don't rewrite" specifically in the context of a software company, where I strongly believe it is largely correct. In the context of a decades-old open source project the decision may be quite different for legitimate reasons.

I find it likely that you'd be better off performing an algorithm extraction and doing a true from-scratch rewrite than trying to incrementally translate TeX and LaTeX.

For the reader's convenience and reference: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

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