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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

#181

Post by HnNoPassMailer »

rmc wrote: post #175
HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to write a paper with it. I found it so horrible that I ended up not writing the paper (on a very interesting topic) and failed class. I just assumed the professor was nutty and kept onto some weird niche software.

Nope, the professor was requesting that you use the standard typesetting software. Some of your classmates might have to write many papers, and hence it's good that they start learning.

Apparently. It's a shame that researchers hae to use such software. Probably part of why research is so conservative and slow. Why not a funky html "paper"? With interactive formulae, clickable links (hey, wasn't PageRank based on references? Maybe time to turn that around) to references. Most important, a clickable link to an academic profile.

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

#183

Post by rflrob »

cavilling_elite wrote: post #140
Loic wrote: post #57

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 completely agree. 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.

> Sometimes you have to find the limit of your software/hardware.

The point is that there does seem to be a software limit, but there shouldn't need to be a particular limit there. There's certainly not a hardware limit, since an iPad can run circles around almost all of the computers of the era when LaTeX was written. Unless you believe that the TeX system represents an almost magical, once-in-a-lifetime, impossible to replicate achievement in software engineering, there's shouldn't be a software limit either, but the code base is so complicated that there does seem to be one.

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

#184

Post by coliveira »

patrickg wrote: post #72
_delirium wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume he meant that core TeX (the part written ages ago by Knuth) is in effect bug-free. However you do have a good point that one effect of core TeX being ancient and not really updated is that, in practice, what people actually use is TeX plus giant macro packages whose size is bigger than TeX itself, and those are certainly not bug-free. It's at least plausible that a rewrite wouldn't lead to more bugs total, i…

Nobody uses (Knuth's) TeX anymore. They use PDFTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX. None of these are as stable as TeX, but in practice a whole lot better than most other software I use.

All of these versions of TeX are just extensions of the original TeX. The core Knuth's code is still used in each one of them. The stability comes from the core, not just from the work of pdftex, xetex and luatex developers.

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

#185

Post by yonran »

nailer wrote: post #124
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…

> For whatever reason, they cannot allow applications to use the existing capabilities of the underlying OS. This goes against the Unix mindset; of course there will be unpleasant consequences, but one cannot hold Unix mindset responsible for these. Using the native capabilities of the OS in the sense you mean - allowing TeX to use its ancient, hideous bitmap font system, goes against: - Unix philisophy - do one thin…

  TeX's original goal of 'allowing anyone to create typeset documents'
Actually, according to this interview[1], speaking of the very first version of TeX, "I should mention that I had no idea that I was designing a typesetting system that anybody else in the world would ever use, besides me and my secretary. My idea was that I would teach Phyllis, who was my secretary for almost 20 years… So Phyllis and I were going to be the users of this TeX system. … I tried to design it just good enough to do my books and no other books."

Even with the released version, I don't think TeX was ever intended to be the last word on typesetting; it was simply his best attempt at a decent markup. He then froze the features so that previously typeset books could be corrected and reprinted using the same source. He left it up to future programs to innovate.

[1]: http://www.webofstories.com/play/17118

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

#186

Post by mbq »

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…

Buying a real netbook is way easier... and you have a better keyboard (-;

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

#187

Post by radarsat1 »

I wonder how hard it would be to modify TeX (or kpathsea, whatever) to load its libraries out of a single compressed tarball or fast database of some kind. Seeing as TeX libraries are text files, I do find it surprising that they don't compress better. Is it mostly the fonts and documentation taking up all that space?

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

#188

Post by Mon_Ouie »

lukeschlather wrote: post #142

Has Apple started allowing non-trivial Turing complete languages into the App store now? Unless I'm mistaken LaTeX would be rejected out of hand no matter how much you clean it up because it is an interpreter.

As there is an app[1] that allows to run Lua code typed by the user, the most likely changed their policy about interpreting code.

[1] Codify: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codify/id439571171?mt=8

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

#189

Post by shaggyfrog »

Tomis wrote: post #126
shaggyfrog wrote: post #79

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.)

You can't do very much within those guidelines, can you?

Totally, that's why there are hardly any apps for iOS, and the paying market is such a fraction of that on Android.

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

#190

Post by EdiX »

roel_v wrote: post #114
gjm11 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Donald Knuth has made a career for himself out of being able to right 'bug free code'? Really? He's made a career for himself out of being an extremely creative computer scientist and writing outstandingly scholarly books about programming. Far from marketing himself as producing bug-free code, he has published articles entirely devoted to the history of bugs found in his software. (As for the bits that tur…

Of course not, it's hyperbole to illustrate the point. In the specific cases of Qmail and TeX, the 'bug free' aspect of it however is overblown and a marketing gimmick. It's not that hard (given enough time) to make something bug free, it's a whole different thing when the software needs to evolve at the same time to meet the (changing and expanding) requirements of actual users.

Actually, the reason for not evolving/rewriting TeX is so that old documents can be typeset and produce the same results. I find that an appealing goal.
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