Hey Mike, Are training wheels on a bike "all wrong"?
To a beginner, training wheels also seem to have points of superiority; yet we expect that as time goes on, the novice will discard the training wheels. This is both a display of increased skill, and a prerequisite for using the bike more effectively overall. But maybe when even all the adults use training wheels too, and they can't imagine a bike without training wheels, this state of affairs would hold people back from using the bike to its full potential. It might even turn out that anyone who does take the initiative of discarding training wheels would seem like a freak who has to justify themselves to others. They might find themselves responding to claims that training wheels aren't "all wrong" ;) And, you know, one of the things I emphasise at the start when teaching LaTeX is that it is contraindicated for small, uncomplicated projects that don't have special typesetting requirements. If someone is just writing a letter to their grandma, they might wish to stick with their conventional word processor, it's no skin off my nose. However, one would hope that in academia, the researcher aspires to create non-trivial documents; certainly many people who have tried writing a thesis in Word later came to lament their choice. Are Word and PowerPoint "all wrong"? Maybe not. But should we be content with software whose main claim to fame is that they're not all wrong and they happen to be used by a lot of people who refuse to discard training wheels? Kind regards, Tim [1] https://github.com/cryptarch/latex-novice.git > As one who writes everything in MarkDown by preference, are Word and > PowerPoint "all wrong"? Yes, their binary formats don't play so well > with revision control than plain-text formats such as MarkDown or > LaTeX, for example (but sticking them under revision control is > still of great benefit). In other ways they're superior: WYSIWYG > editors, no compilation steps, PDF-generation from within the tool, > and they're ubiquitous. Similarly, for some tasks they allow a user > to "do more in less time with less pain" than the alternatives*. > > cheers, > mike > > * Having spent more than the 5 minutes it should have taken > yesterday trying (and failing even with Google's help) to put a > hyperlink to a Wikipedia page with multiple underscores in a LaTeX > document and have it clickable in the resulting PDF. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
