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The author seems to blame Latex, when the fault squarely lies with Apple and their "any iPad app be a single executable" policy. Oh, and Latex is not 4GB. The

The author seems to blame Latex, when the fault squarely lies with Apple and their "any iPad app be a single executable" policy. Oh, and Latex is not 4GB. The standard,minimal distribution (which is what 99% users will ever need) fits inside of 50MB (with all the fonts). For everything else there is CTAN. So now it's Latex's fault that Apple does not understand the concept of packages and libraries ?

lukeschlather 14y ago
Apple understands it perfectly well. They just don't want any iOS apps that contain package managers. Which makes sense from their perspective, but it's very user-hostile.
- taligent 14y ago
  I am quite sure that Apple is okay with neglecting the handful of people who are missing package managers.
- rrreese 14y ago
  I think that Apple sees this as not being user hostile. If you want packages installed then you have to use the appstore and in app downloads. This has the advantage of being a consistent experience across all apps. Users do not need to fear in app downloads, or get confused by them they get the same experience every time. Obviously this hurt geeks like us who have no problem using a more exotic system, but in general it favours the bulk of Apples user base. Note that this applies to purchases as well, if you give the app money its always through the same interface. Users see spending money in iOS as being painless and danger free. Do I wish I had more power over my iPad? Sure do, but Apple doesn't care about us, they care about the 90% of users who are less sophisticated then us.
stiff 14y ago
I thought the description of the problems with LaTeX architecture was pretty concrete and convincing. Knuth is no doubt a genius, I admire him as much as anyone, but he does his work in a certain niche in a very isolated setting and probably doesn't have that much experience doing software engineering work on larger projects and with other people. For me, one of the big lessons from working on projects for a few years with other people, was that you should avoid taking big technical risks on non-toy projects as much as possible. I am sure most people reading this have seen projects that are valuable in themselves, but where someone at some point thought he can at the same time create a better web framework / better database / better encryption library etc. and now this valuable piece of software depends in thousands of places on a very peculiar solution that only the author (often having some authority at the company/project, a CTO or a valued programmer) knows and only the author likes - it ended up not getting any traction or wasn't even extracted from the core project and presented to the world. In projects that will live for many years and will need to be maintained by many people, it is important to remember that the vitality of the project will be proportional to the amount of people A) being able and B) willing to use the tools the project is built with, so it is important to use already estabilished tools, pick less-critical projects for experiments, always extract any new infrastructure pieces right from the start into a separate project, document it, see whether other people want to use it etc. That's why I think LaTeX rewritten in simple C would be valuable and what the author has written is a testament to what I have written above - maybe we would not end up with a mix of WEB/Pascal, C and bash scripts if the original TeX/LaTeX was a program more people understood and could easily modify.
- pstuart 14y ago
  It looks like there's a C version of WEB: http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/cweb.html http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/cweb.html
taligent 14y ago
I really don't get what you mean by that last statement. iOS like OSX is a UNIX operating system hence contains hundreds of libraries. And developers are more than able to use libraries in iOS. They can create them, use shared libraries or frameworks. None of which stops you from releasing apps.

lukeschlather 14y ago

Apple understands it perfectly well. They just don't want any iOS apps that contain package managers. Which makes sense from their perspective, but it's very user-hostile.

taligent 14y ago
I am quite sure that Apple is okay with neglecting the handful of people who are missing package managers.
rrreese 14y ago
I think that Apple sees this as not being user hostile. If you want packages installed then you have to use the appstore and in app downloads. This has the advantage of being a consistent experience across all apps. Users do not need to fear in app downloads, or get confused by them they get the same experience every time. Obviously this hurt geeks like us who have no problem using a more exotic system, but in general it favours the bulk of Apples user base. Note that this applies to purchases as well, if you give the app money its always through the same interface. Users see spending money in iOS as being painless and danger free. Do I wish I had more power over my iPad? Sure do, but Apple doesn't care about us, they care about the 90% of users who are less sophisticated then us.

stiff 14y ago

I thought the description of the problems with LaTeX architecture was pretty concrete and convincing. Knuth is no doubt a genius, I admire him as much as anyone, but he does his work in a certain niche in a very isolated setting and probably doesn't have that much experience doing software engineering work on larger projects and with other people. For me, one of the big lessons from working on projects for a few years with other people, was that you should avoid taking big technical risks on non-toy projects as much as possible. I am sure most people reading this have seen projects that are valuable in themselves, but where someone at some point thought he can at the same time create a better web framework / better database / better encryption library etc. and now this valuable piece of software depends in thousands of places on a very peculiar solution that only the author (often having some authority at the company/project, a CTO or a valued programmer) knows and only the author likes - it ended up not getting any traction or wasn't even extracted from the core project and presented to the world. In projects that will live for many years and will need to be maintained by many people, it is important to remember that the vitality of the project will be proportional to the amount of people A) being able and B) willing to use the tools the project is built with, so it is important to use already estabilished tools, pick less-critical projects for experiments, always extract any new infrastructure pieces right from the start into a separate project, document it, see whether other people want to use it etc. That's why I think LaTeX rewritten in simple C would be valuable and what the author has written is a testament to what I have written above - maybe we would not end up with a mix of WEB/Pascal, C and bash scripts if the original TeX/LaTeX was a program more people understood and could easily modify.

pstuart 14y ago
It looks like there's a C version of WEB: http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/cweb.html http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/cweb.html

taligent 14y ago

I really don't get what you mean by that last statement. iOS like OSX is a UNIX operating system hence contains hundreds of libraries. And developers are more than able to use libraries in iOS. They can create them, use shared libraries or frameworks. None of which stops you from releasing apps.