On Sep 29, 2010, at 6:53 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 06:42:42PM -0400, Alan Munn wrote:
On Sep 29, 2010, at 5:59 PM, Peter Dyballa wrote:
Am 29.09.2010 um 23:40 schrieb Philipp Stephani:
reality is approximately as follows: Users who read beginner
documents such as lshort don't want to use TeX, but are forced
to do so by their advisor. They don't want to read discussions
about the pros and cons of various text editors or why Microsoft
is evil. Beginners usually know how to visit web sites and how
to create simple documents in Microsoft Word (perhaps in three
years from now they might not know about the latter, simply
because they don't need it). Not a bit more. They don't know
what a text file or a text editor is, they have never heard the
word "Unicode", and they have never used a programming language
before. What they need are step-by-step instructions that tell
them, in simple words, how to create TeX documents.
This *might* have been the situation in the so-called first or
industrialised world 20 years ago.
No, in fact this is very accurate (except maybe the part about being
forced by advisors). How often do you actually interact with
undergraduate (or even graduate students) Pete? My experience is
that they're really good at updating their Facebook status, but
things deteriorate quickly from there, exactly as Philipp describes.
And I deal with a broad range of students at a major US research
university.
Well, I myself graduated last month, so...
Well, there's always "the exception proves the rule" :-) (although in
my business, we usually say that the exception proves the rule is
wrong.) Lest I sound like I think all students are idiots, that
wasn't really my point, just that there are many, many students (who
might form a good part of the intended audience for lshort) who really
have quite limited skills with a computer, and quite limited
understanding of how they work. This is despite the fact that they
use them all the time. But what they use them for (web browsing,
listening to music, IM-ing, facebooking, twittering etc.) is quite a
long way from the kind of knowledge that Pete seems to think they
have, and much closer to what Philipp described. This also doesn't
mean that they can't learn; they can. Many of these turn out to be
very adept at using computers in the way we use them once you give
them some training, but we shouldn't overestimate their initial
abilities.
Now for some off topic continuation:
I would be willing to bet that *fewer* high school/college students
have ever written a computer program now than 20 or 30 years ago.
Instead, what gets taught (if anything) is how to use (and I use that
term loosely) some applications like Office and perhaps some Creative
Suite type things. Programming isn't generally taught partially as a
result of GUIs: it's a lot more complicated to write a even a simple
program for a Mac or a PC running Windows than it was in the days of
everything being command line driven. In fact, despite my having
written tens of thousands of lines of Fortran and (eek!) BASIC for
engineering purposes on VMS/Sun machines and early PCs, the only
software I've written lately is some ruby scripts. Why? I don't have
much need to program my Mac, and I certainly don't have the time or
inclination to learn how to write a GUI driven program, since it's not
necessary for my day to day work.
Why should the average person need to learn to program a computer?
It's like asking why they should learn to repair their fridge. But of
course when a student bumps up against TeX, they are confronted with
many things which are truly out of their actual experience with
computers (again, for most people).
Alan
--
Alan Munn
am...@gmx.com
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