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MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

mackichan.com

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Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#111

Post by cardiffspaceman »

mgubi wrote: post #95
ChrisLomont wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LaTeX imports and interprets arbitrary LaTeX, so other programs can theoretically do just as well. Importers running up against Halting Problems occur in many document formats, but this is not an issue in practice since most documents are not nefarious, and any importer can (and should) have sensible timeouts for parsing.

No, document formats are not turing complete. HTML for example can be parsed without any problem. However take this TeX snippet "\foo [bar]" and tell me if "bar" is an argument of "foo" or not, without running the macro (which maybe you do not have. This is the basic problem any TeX conversion program encounters. TeX is not a document format but a programming language. The only thing you can do with a TeX program is…

I once upgraded an EPS interpreter that was used as the key piece of an EPS importer. I added a couple of PS things like 'arcto'. It seems to me a LaTeX importer could work as an interpreter, too. Probably not very much fun after a while.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#114

Post by quietbritishjim »

GiovanniP wrote: post #85
SiempreViernes wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mainly tables and to some extent figures that are intrinsically harder to read when written in TeX. The bulk of the text is just text , so if that's hard to read that's down to your editor settings.

I have an example on-hand for that---it is also equations, look at this, I need to compile it to understand it (it needs the amsmath package): { \def \l {\mathrm{l}} \def \r {\mathrm{r}} \def \Bl {\mathrm{Bl}} \def \Br {\mathrm{Br}} \def \B {\mathrm{B}} \def \nIIom {n_{2\omega}} \begin{equation}\label{eq:interface_conditions} \begin{aligned} F_{1\l} &= F_{2\r} + F_{2\l} \exp (i\,k_2 L) + F_{\Br} + F_{\Bl} \exp(i\,k_\…

Just to add to that, your example would be even worse if you didn't have the macros at the beginning:

    F_{1\mathrm{l}} &= F_{2\mathrm{r}} + F_{2\mathrm{l}} \exp (i\,k_2 L) + F_{\mathrm{Br}} + F_{\mathrm{Bl}} \exp(i\,k_\mathrm{B} L)
    ...
The obvious objection is that of course most people do use macros. But that's the point: every LaTeX document ends up being its own impenetrable language.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#115

Post by submeta »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #105

Hmmm I've never heard about this software but I found some screenshots in google search, the UI looks a lot like another old CAS that I used in high school, "Derive" [1]. Derive was great :-) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_syste...

„Derive“ was an excellent piece of software. Loved it. Until I came across Mathematica years later.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#116

Post by TchoBeer »

mgubi wrote: post #96
TchoBeer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh Lord, who thought that name was good

Well, I guess that if you use "Python" you expect to really have to deal with a snake then.

I understand that "the python programming language" probably doesn't involve snakes. On the other hand, "the TeXmacs math typesetting software" doesn't obviously not involve LaTeX and isn't obviously not for emacs.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#117

Post by SloopJon »

bachmeier wrote: post #47

I used Scientific Word to write my dissertation and my first academic papers. It was a great piece of software in the late 1990s, at least relative to the alternatives, which were writing .tex files yourself or typing in a word processor. I have a coauthor that still uses SW. I can't say this is surprising. I moved to LyX long ago, and then after markdown became popular I ditched LyX and went with that. There are lot…

How does Markdown fill the niche of TeX or Scientific Word? Is there a mathematically oriented fork? You mentioned R Markdown in another comment, but I don't see anything in the gallery that looks germane.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#118

Post by handrous »

lowercased wrote: post #90
jaclaz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if I may, there is something that doesn't sound (to me) "rational". I have seen quite a few of these cases where a larger company buys the old one (essentially to get a list of their current customers) and then terminates the product replacing it with some crappy new stuff that usually completely fails to work, but in this case the soon-to-retire programmer at least gets some (little) money (and knowledge is lo…

> This hypothetical young programmer could - I believe - invest some time to understand not so much the actual codebase, but rather the workflow of the program and re-write it along that same workflow in a new language/platform/whatever. > I am pretty sure that those niche users would be ready to pay a fair amount of money to have something modern/updated that actually works and works like the old one. I don't know.…

> I don't know. My experience is, for many smaller niche things, they're entrenched in orgs and used The One Way, and any deviation - change a button label, add a menu, etc - will result in a lot of complaints from existing users. They'll have to 'retrain', etc.

People hate this just as much in almost any software (or, most any UI, physical or virtual, for that matter), they just often don't have a way to push back.

You wouldn't know it based on current trends, but consistency and predictability are king in user interfaces, as far as actual usability goes. So much so that high levels of severe bugginess can be preferable than less-severe and common bugginess, if the former is consistent and predictable ("if I press this button then that one, the application will crash or glitch, every single time, no matter what state the program is in—so, I won't do that") and the latter isn't ("about once a day this button takes me to the wrong screen, and the behavior seems random"). If your users are your top priority, changes will occur gradually, and only with excellent motivation. Grand re-designs are among the most user-hostile things you can do (despite their popularity).

[EDIT] to be clear, they don't have a way to push back in the modern age of rolling updates and old versions being infeasible to obtain at all, possibly broken even if you can, and, most likely, full of known vulnerabilities that will never be patched. In the old days of desktop software that you actually purchased, and that operated just fine entirely offline, the way to push back was not to upgrade, and it was common.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#119

Post by low_common »

keid wrote: post #87

Way back when, just after the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, a company named Triad Computing was formed by J. Mack Adams, Roger Hunter, and Barry MacKichan, with the goal of creating a WYSIWYG technical text editing system. I was their first employee. Roger, Barry, and I did all the programming. Venture capital for this sort of thing wasn't common then; we raised operating capital by contract work (e.g. I wrote…

What did J. Mack Adams do?

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#120

Post by qurashee »

Upon reading this article I thought I should check the fate of one of my favourite astronomy software (SkyMap). Looks like it had the same fate last year, Chris Marriott (the sole developer) decided to retire. I don't really get though why shut up shop and not open source such one man projects :(
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