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You'd rather have plain text than hand-written diagrams? I think most of the difficulty is in not knowing APL like notation.
by throwaway7645 9y ago
You'd rather have plain text than hand-written diagrams? I think most of the difficulty is in not knowing APL like notation.
- logfromblammo 9y agoYes, but I have a tool for making images on my computer, too. The handwritten bound notebook cannot be searched, diff'ed, or versioned. It is strictly inferior to the plaintext file in most ways that are in any way relevant to writing software. Its nemesis, of course, is and has always been the mathematical equation, whose notations confound the plaintext writer at every turn. For those, you can write it to an image, or use LaTeX or MathML.
- throwaway7645 9y agoSo searching an image is definitely nice, but it's a tradeoff in my opinion as it takes much longer to write out an equation in equation editor (I'm very proficient btw) or the other mathematical CAD tools I use when compared to a Notebook sketch. I use them all the time, take a pic and put it in OneNote with some keywords to search.
- Retra 9y agoLearn LaTeX and stop wasting your time with equation editors.
- throwaway7645 9y agoI'm right below the cusp where I think it will be more efficient to learn Latex.
- nicky0 9y agoThis assumes that the purpose of the doucment is to be archived, searched, diffed and reproduced. None of these is in fact the case. The purpose is as a tool in the production of the program being written.
- logfromblammo 9y agoAnd you don't think that should be put into source control? It is just as important to control process documents as it is to control source code files.
- nicky0 9y agoSure, take photographs of the pages and add the to them repo for future reference.
- MaulingMonkey 9y agoWith a paint program I can color code. With ASCII diagrams I can actually draw a straight line. With paper I can have eraser marks everywhere. (But I do use paper some - focus reasons, and easier to manage than terrible phone interfaces.)