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> Anyone who has done serious work in Word, or some other WYSIWG editor has got to the point where the document becomes FUBAR, and you have to copy the plain te

by gota 7y ago

> Anyone who has done serious work in Word, or some other WYSIWG editor has got to the point where the document becomes FUBAR, and you have to copy the plain text, and start again with a new document I'm sorry but, speaking from experience, that is just not true in all cases. Granted, it takes a certain kind of methodic work (and more know-how of the tool than would be reasonable) to work around many of the problems but if you put in the time to learn, Word (and similar software) is more than adequate for large-scale editing work. It's no wonder the absolute majority of people use it; the learn how to avoid the problems (or live with them) and there is near zero incentive to personally switch. The majority of the onus is paid by the next batch of people who have to learn it. I'll also agree that it's not what I want for comments and that better models exist for 90% of all text-editing tasks out there. But it does work

saltcured 7y ago
What do you mean by "large-scale editing work"? Are you talking about the size of the document? The duration of the editing lifecycle? The number of participating authors and authoring systems? The full editing/consumption lifecycle for a long lived document that goes through many revisions and publications for several decades? Things I've seen fail with Word in my career that would be unacceptable for programming: - Relatively simple docs being eaten alive, as described in grandparent comment, after several dozen authors make small edits over the course of a few weeks. - Complete change-tracking disasters when attempting to merge concurrent edits to different parts of a document by several authors. - Docs where the WYSIWYG behavior completely changed when opened 5-10 years later by newer versions of Word. Attempting to import/export/save as to rescue it involves much of the same cut-paste and hand recovery described previously. - Docs destroyed by international collaboration, where different locales of each editor seem to accumulate contradictions in the saved document over time. - Inconsistent WYSIWYG between Word on Windows and Word on Mac OS. I don't think it is responsible to promote a programming language that does not have a tooling-independent and platform-independent textual representation that carries ALL program semantics as manipulable, printable character sequences. That promotes disposable code and prevents real programming in the large. (edited to try to rescue bullet list)

by gota 7y ago

saltcured 7y ago

What do you mean by "large-scale editing work"? Are you talking about the size of the document? The duration of the editing lifecycle? The number of participating authors and authoring systems? The full editing/consumption lifecycle for a long lived document that goes through many revisions and publications for several decades? Things I've seen fail with Word in my career that would be unacceptable for programming: - Relatively simple docs being eaten alive, as described in grandparent comment, after several dozen authors make small edits over the course of a few weeks. - Complete change-tracking disasters when attempting to merge concurrent edits to different parts of a document by several authors. - Docs where the WYSIWYG behavior completely changed when opened 5-10 years later by newer versions of Word. Attempting to import/export/save as to rescue it involves much of the same cut-paste and hand recovery described previously. - Docs destroyed by international collaboration, where different locales of each editor seem to accumulate contradictions in the saved document over time. - Inconsistent WYSIWYG between Word on Windows and Word on Mac OS. I don't think it is responsible to promote a programming language that does not have a tooling-independent and platform-independent textual representation that carries ALL program semantics as manipulable, printable character sequences. That promotes disposable code and prevents real programming in the large. (edited to try to rescue bullet list)