Re: Quote by Knuth

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

Christopher Dimech wrote:

> Thousands of other people have a doctorate in mathematics
> apart from Knuth

Hahaha :)

> But I have read Knuth's papers and understand exactly his
> position on what is literate programming. He mas not
> combining "writing for humans" ("literature") and "writing
> for machines" (programming). He wanted programming to be
> like literature. Thusly I am in disagreement with him.

But isn't that the same thing, isn't literature "writing for
humans"? Well, it isn't programming anyway, try compiling
"Collected Short Stories" by Ivan Tolstoyevksy and see what
happens ... yeah, DNC ... but I've heard some HUMANS read it
and thought it was good! (Maybe some of them just pretended to
have read all 14 volumes.)

> Without Knuth others would have delved into the analysis of
> algorithms. Mostly it is about the development of tex
> everybody gets fired about. Without tex, few would have
> heard of him. Still, mathematical typesetting already
> existed before Knuth. In actual fact, he got all his ideas
> from the typesetting that already existed. In "Mathematical
> Typography," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society,
> March 1979, Vol. 1, No. 2, 337-72; he stated that his
> typesetting ideas originated from the Transactions of the
> American Mathematical Society, which began publication in
> 1900; and some other journal (a dutch one if I remember).

Yeah, but regardless of whatever, science and all human
progress works like that ... and that's a good thing.

> And, let us not deny it, with a lot of help from Guy Steele.

It is a GOOD thing he got help from other talented people!

> TeX has got people to focus on pretty printing, which is
> what typesetting is mainly about. But structural and
> semantic info are receiving greater and greater awareness as
> opposed to formatting or displaying aspects. LaTeX mended
> some of the problems with TeX by turning a pretty printing
> system into a structured documentation system.

Again,

1. That's the purpose of the tool (and not _just_ "pretty" as
   you say, also useful, indispensable stuff like math
   notation, formulaes, diagrams, indexes, footnotes,
   hyperlinks, captions, tables ...) When ideas are
   compilicated this help A LOT to convey them, also PRODUCING
   such material help the people who are active with it in
   their creative/thought process.

2. Not all people should be the same, that would be horrible
   and a totally defuct world/race! Some people care about
   this stuff and that's good for them, YOU should be active
   in the fields that YOU care about, Stop waste time on
   negativism and get into the game yourself.

PS. Some pretty good looking LaTeX if I may :)
      https://dataswamp.org/~incal/borta/borta.pdf - LITERATURE!
      https://dataswamp.org/~incal/hs-linux/docs/report/report.pdf
    - also FOR HUMANS but contains SOURCE - oh, my! what does
    that mean? I'm not a girl but is it GOOD or BAD? it is so
    hard to know! and if it stinks and didn't get a single
    citation which would BTW put in in the top echelon of the
    military-scholarly-publicistic complex - all acording to
    our man on the field covering the university world,
    Mr. Dimech - how do you check that BTW, the number of
    citations? - anyway if it stink is it beacuse I spent too
    much time on LaTeX [2] and forgor about the actual task?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Querulant
[2] https://dataswamp.org/~incal/hs-linux/docs/report/report.tex

-- 
underground experts united
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