4 ms·
The special naming convention is mostly used as a form of elitist gatekeeping; it's a tribal shibboleth. You should be able to figure out whether someone is tal
by TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
The special naming convention is mostly used as a form of elitist gatekeeping; it's a tribal shibboleth. You should be able to figure out whether someone is talking about latex (polymer) or latex (markup) from context, so having a special naming convention is rather pretentious and superfluous. If calling it lay-tek was important, they should've called it laytek. Historically, as I understand it, distinctions between the written and spoken forms of words were used as a form of gatekeeping between elites and commoners. Same goes for arXiv.
The great thing about language is that you can just change things if enough people play along. Call it gif or jif, arxiv or archive, latex or laytek.
- josephg 1y agoEh - the name is a bit of fun. Its fun to form communities with in-jokes and tribal knowledge and silly names. It doesn't hurt anyone. Lets not sacrifice everything joyous at the altar of being friendly to noobs.
- mariusor 1y agoThey did call it Latek, the X in the name is the Greek letter χ (Chi) and in my opinion, it's not an elitist shibboleth but a way to showcase the advantages of their typesetting system over existing, at the time, methods that didn't invest a lot in rendering non ASCII character sets.
- xboxnolifes 1y agoSo it's not actually LaTaX, it's LaTeχ. Make sure you type it properly i guess.
- IshKebab 1y agoIs arXiv not pronounced the same as "archive"? I agree with you about LaTeX but arXiv seems like an obvious allusion to "archive"?
- DemocracyFTW2 1y agoWell it does lack that final -e of archive, and—fun fact!—like LaTeX which I know as ['la:teç], arXiv could plausibly be pronounced [ar'çi:f] in German although I've never heard anyone pronounce that name. So why is it arXiv not at least arXive with an -e?
- IshKebab 1y agoBecause they're trying to be quirky I guess, but it is still unmistakably a weird spelling of "archive" (especially given the context).
- n2h4 1y agoin both arXiv and LaTeX, X is greek(chi).