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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

#131

Post by neilv »

codebolt wrote: post #7

Wow, very sad to hear this. My high school ran a trial project back in 2000 and my class became the first in my country where every student received a laptop to use in all classes. We used Scientific Notebook for math. Being able to solve any equation and draw any graph with the click of a button was a huge boost in my ability to grasp trig, polynomials, logarithms, etc. I actually went from D-level math student pre-…

I bet the developer would be glad to hear this. That's one of the optimistic earlier visions of computers.

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

#133

Post by tibbetts »

deregulateMed wrote: post #22
tibbetts wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One person businesses often require a unique collection of skills to operate and don’t make enough money to hire a team of professional operators. This is also true of traditional small businesses like restaurants and car mechanics. The phenomenon is discussed extensively in the “E-myth” series of books. The TLDR is if you ever want to get someone else to run your business, you have to be careful to systematize and d…

I relate to this. 1 person company means getting the job done. As soon as you have 2 people you really need 3. One to do the labor, the other to schedule and bill(receptionist). If it's a physical company you need more space. Some software charges by person too. If something gets cancelled, the 1 person company takes a few hours off. Your 3 person company still needs to get their weekly paychecks. Whenever I hear cal…

People in Germany and Norway somehow start companies. Maybe they make do without receptionists?

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

#134

Post by tibbetts »

aynyc wrote: post #23
tibbetts wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One person businesses often require a unique collection of skills to operate and don’t make enough money to hire a team of professional operators. This is also true of traditional small businesses like restaurants and car mechanics. The phenomenon is discussed extensively in the “E-myth” series of books. The TLDR is if you ever want to get someone else to run your business, you have to be careful to systematize and d…

People buy restaurants and car shops mainly because of licensing such as alcohol and zoning laws. It's rare for a specialty shop to be sold unless the owner has an apprentice.

It’s more common if the specialty shop has expanded to a chain. Because the same skills and tactics it takes to make a chain business also make a salable / maintainable business.

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

#135

Post by mgubi »

TchoBeer wrote: post #116
mgubi wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a bit discomforting seeing that discussion in hackernews just remain at the level of "bad choice of name, btw!" without no technical insights. I would have expected more sensible reactions. TeX and Emacs were initial inspirations to TeXmacs (which has been written in the '90). As such they indeed inform some of the design choices, that said TeXmacs do not conform to them. The Emacs legacy is however very clear: all the editor behaviour is re-programmable in Scheme, from keybindings to menus, to the graphics editor (see here a recent example http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/why-not-draw-circle-by-center-and-...). As for the TeX legacy, TeXmacs actually improves on it by defining a document format while retaining the power of creating user defined macros, it also allows scheme code to be called from macros, since its beginning, 20+ years before LuaTeX. An overview of TeXmacs design can be found here: https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/overview.html . I think people nowadays are more used to programs which are epsilon changes over existing systems, repackaged with brand new names. That is why TeXmacs could be puzzling at first. Does not fit usual categories. Maybe this says something of the current trends in (free)software design.

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

#136

Post by mgubi »

cardiffspaceman wrote: post #111
mgubi wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Graphics is different since usually the graphics primitives are the common substrate of all graphics languages, so the interpreter can just be adapted to a different backend. For more structured content this is not possible: the natural output of TeX is a sequence of graphics boxes for the glyphs, or something like a DVI format. It is too late to retain semantic informations, e.g. about mathematical formula. Ask anybody which writes LaTeX/HTML converters for example. TeXmacs does a good job to interpret "usual" LaTeX files but you cannot expect to be able to interpret arbitrary files and still retain semantic informations, e.g.: sectioning, references, emphasised texts, theorem statements, change of languages (e.g. from English to C++ to Math...) etc...

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

#137

Post by dang »

musingsole wrote: post #127
dang wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments.

The previous comment made a joke of how despite being a capable device for education, it didn't have the features that drive commercial success. How was it unsubstantive?

The bar for a one-liner joke like that to count as substantive is high—it needs to include something genuinely new and clever or else it's just internet fodder, and will encourage others to make even worse posts. The GP comment was way too obvious and predictable to clear that bar, which is why it led to a lame subthread (mostly now flagkilled).

The gold standard HN explanation about this was by scott_s many years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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

#138

Post by GiovanniP »

mgubi wrote: post #136
cardiffspaceman wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Graphics is different since usually the graphics primitives are the common substrate of all graphics languages, so the interpreter can just be adapted to a different backend. For more structured content this is not possible: the natural output of TeX is a sequence of graphics boxes for the glyphs, or something like a DVI format. It is too late to retain semantic informations, e.g. about mathematical formula. Ask anyb…

> For more structured content this is not possible: the natural output of TeX is a sequence of graphics boxes for the glyphs, or something like a DVI format. It is too late to retain semantic informations, e.g. about mathematical formula.

I think this applies to the natural output of TeX's "mouth" as well, i.e. one could exapnd LaTeX macros till one obtains TeX primitives, but at that point the information on structure is already lost.

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

#139

Post by quietbritishjim »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #92
GiovanniP wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does pretty poorly at importing LaTeX As far as I know, an importer that interprets arbitrary LaTeX cannot exist (i.e. you have to run LaTeX on the file) because the grammar of LaTeX documents is Turing-complete. There is a StackExchange Q&A where this is explained, but I do not understand the arguments ;-)

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.

> LaTeX imports and interprets arbitrary LaTeX, so other programs can theoretically do just as well.

Right, but the output is a typeset document. The fact that LaTeX (the program) can do this is no evidence at all that it would be possible to build a program that converts LaTeX (the format) into some intermediate representation that make sense to a human. For example, assuming that macros are recursively expanded in place, it's possible that there's no clear dividing line between "this is a user macro that should be expanded before exporting" and "this is an internal macro that should not be expanded" (e.g. you probably want to leave "theorem environment" from AMS package unexpanded because that is semantic information you'd want when you edit the document). As another example, what should be a table or equation etc. might end up as individual lines and characters floating around as separate elements on a page.

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

#140

Post by 7thaccount »

padthai wrote: post #41
7thaccount wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is due to retirement, the other employees might not be able to take over the product if it has been a 1 person show. I know of similar software where if the main developer were to leave, I have zero confidence they could do much besides maintenance. It isn't just the code, but having the mathematical understanding of the problem. Also, without looking at this in general, I wonder if it's hard to compete with Ma…

Mathematica is at least ~$1.5k/year, ~$3k if you want only the desktop application, no WolframAlpha-like features. Licenses on the desktop are not per user, but per machine (8 core limitation). If you want to move the installation to another machine, you have to send them a signed document and contact Wolfram (the company, not the person). I could go on all day about the friction and restrictions. They have an excell…

Fully agreed on the friction. It is quite annoying if you have a license, but it's not widespread at your company. The core restrictions are rediculous as well for such an expensive product.

I use it for things I need, but similar to you, I try to stick to other tools (Python for me) just to avoid the frustrations.

They can move a license fairly easily, but there ended up being some other annoying issues for me recently that made me want to wash my hands entirely.

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