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LaTeX is a wonderful gateway for many students to expand their exposure to code. A lot of students will shy away from coding prefering more hands on work in th
by knolan 9y ago
LaTeX is a wonderful gateway for many students to expand their exposure to code.
A lot of students will shy away from coding prefering more hands on work in the lab.
Some students will use Matlab or LabVIEW to perform some essential task and hate every minute of it. It might be some stastical analysis they don't understand built with spaghetti code they've inherited, or it might be for controlling a contrary piece of lab equipment. Either way they feel threatened by it or don't want to spend the time learning to understand it.
Show them a basic LaTeX document and how it can make writing papers and, importantly their thesis, much easier than the horror show that is Word and suddenly there is a moment of wonder.
- macintux 9y agoI'd hope just the dramatic improvement in appearance would be enough. Seeing any scientific content in Word makes me ill.
- knolan 9y agoYes, generally the response to first seeing the output is wonder at how elegant and professional it looks.
- santaclaus 9y ago> LabVIEW Oh god, when I was an undergrad we had to spend a semester of junior/senior year doing an applied stint in a physics lab on campus, and I still have nightmares about the decade old Frankenstein's monster of a LabVIEW document that was thrown in my lap... trying to debug thousands of nodes in this flat data flow nightmare while interfacing with shaky equipment held together with scotch tape was horrific. I immediately noped out to applied math.