Re: What's wrong with this picture?
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On 2008-01-09 10:27:39 -0500, walter@digitalmars-nospamm.com (Walter
Bright) said:
Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:
I know of another successful language that has two even more distinct
user categories: LaTeX. There are users and there are package writers.
I'm probably a LaTeX "advanced beginner" and all I can do when I need
to solve a problem is to download a package that does it for me in ways
that I have no understanding of, use it, and scramble my way out of
whatever errors I get into.
The difference with Latex, however, is that the user can simply look at
the output of Latex and see if it is right or not. This is not true of
programming language libraries, because our test suites are never good
enough.
Our document test suites are never good enough, either. That's why so
many publications have errata pages. People, and programmers in
particular, tend to underestimate the difficulty of producing
documents that are correct, readable, and beautiful. Programming in
LaTeX is, in some ways, much harder than programming in [insert name of
your favorite programming language here]. It's poorly structured and
often poorly documented. Many writers do "download a package ... that
[they] have no understanding of" and manage to get minimally acceptable
results, but doing a good job requires study, experimentation, and
testing, just like writing solid code does.
--
Pete
Roundhouse Consulting, Ltd. (www.versatilecoding.com) Author of "The
Standard C++ Library Extensions: a Tutorial and Reference
(www.petebecker.com/tr1book)
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