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knuth is the only developer believing he can ship a (the?) bug free sofwtare. And he is the only developer that I would trust to be able to achieve this. TeX -

by julie1 13y ago

knuth is the only developer believing he can ship a (the?) bug free sofwtare. And he is the only developer that I would trust to be able to achieve this. TeX -at my opinion- in his mind is intended to be untouched after is death as a legacy to all software devs that will claim: - you can do software bug free; - you can do software that stand the test of time; - you can do software that you can measure to be correct in regard to the problem it addresses. (Here: everlasting document typesetting). It is the only source format/code I have from the 1996 that still compile and gives exactly the same output. And we all claim that softwares always have bugs, and must evolve. Sometimes I think we are just justifying our own lack of dedication and hard work for a perfect design that is stable and does the whole job correctly since beginning. This software is the one that makes me realize I am fraud and every time I print something with LaTeX I wonder how broken «progress» is when all the bloatware we have fail in so many aspects where TeX succeeds.

nailer 13y ago
Knuth's definition of 'bug' is a limited one, that seems to be mainly about logic errors. Allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document (which very few users actually wish to do in 2014) would be considered a bug in other typesetting software. This is actually a fantastic illustration of the gap between academic and industry concepts of computing.
- nycticorax 13y ago
  When exactly do you think allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document became a bug? It certainly wasn't when TeX was first written. Do you imagine it magically became a bug on a particular date? Also, isn't TeX limited to the .tex -> .dvi transformation? I'm not sure the transformation from .dvi to .ps/.pdf is even part of TeX proper. And that's where the bitmapped fonts come in. In summary, all of this may just be a fantastic illustration of the gap between Don Knuth and you.
  - nailer 13y ago
    > When exactly do you think allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document became a bug? I was about to say: "Good question. At one point everyone who had access to a computer was a programmer, as using an OS required programming skills. As that slowly phased away, considering issues which lead users into bad paths, documentation errors, and usability issues as bugs became more common." Then I saw: > "Do you imagine it magically became a bug on a particular date?" and > In summary, all of this may just be a fantastic illustration of the gap between Don Knuth and you. Snark is unwelcome here. See http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - microtherion 12y ago
      But "Do you imagine it magically became a bug on a particular date?" is a fairly pertinent question, as one of the advantages of TeX is that you can still typeset manuscripts decades after they were published.
    - nycticorax 12y ago
      I apologize for the snark. But I thought that your first statement was questionable, and that therefore your second statement was rather facile. > Knuth's definition of 'bug' is a limited one, that seems to be mainly about logic errors. Allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document (which very few users actually wish to do in 2014) would be considered a bug in other typesetting software. Certainly, people sometimes use "bug" loosely, but it seems to me there is a strict sense in which a "bug" means something that was not intended by the writer of the code. And the issue you describe clearly does not fit this description. I would call what you describe a "design flaw", at best. But as I alluded to, it wasn't even a design flaw at the time it was introduced. So it's really more of an anachronism than anything else. And again, it's not really clear that it's even an anachronism in TeX, since it's more of an issue with the DVI-to-PS (or DVI-to-PDF) transformation. And then you went on to conclude, from this highly questionable chain of reasoning, that this "bug" is "a fantastic illustration of the gap between academic and industry concepts of computing". Which I just find galling. Here you're talking about one of the most celebrated computer scientists of all time, someone who is almost certainly a lot smarter than you (or I), and you chalk up a difference between what you and he call a bug to the difference between industry and academia. As if Knuth is just some kind of ivory-tower crackpot who wouldn't understand the real-world exigencies of industry. So: I think your definition of "bug" is highly questionable, and I think that in the future, when you find yourself in disagreement with some celebrated academic computer scientist, you should perhaps linger a bit longer on the possibility that you might be mistaken, rather than chalking it all up to the difference between industry and academia.
- Shorel 13y ago
  I disagree with calling a deprecated feature a bug. Oranges to apples.
  - nailer 12y ago
    Last time I tried TeX was in the early 2000s, but I suspect it hasn't changed that much. At the time metafont pushed people into bitmap fonts, and using scalable formats was quite difficult.
dalke 13y ago
As Knuth's article points out, TeX had a bug, which has been fixed, and the fix could cause a .tex file from 1996 to give different output after the fix.
_delirium 13y ago
And we all claim that softwares always have bugs, and must evolve. Sometimes I think we are just justifying our own lack of dedication and hard work for a perfect design that is stable and does the whole job correctly since beginning. To give one example where TeX hasn't evolved, and which I think is a wrong decision rather than "perfect design": its Unicode handling is atrocious. Of course, this is because Unicode didn't exist when TeX was designed. But now it does. In fact it not only exists, but is the default text encoding on most contemporary machines. My locale is set to en_US.UTF-8, for example, and I'd therefore expect my toolchain, from grep through TeX, to be able to handle UTF-8 text. But TeX chokes on it. (Fortunately, the developers of pdfTeX aren't as averse to adding new features as Knuth is, so I've switched to that.)
ternaryoperator 13y ago
I share your admiration for Knuth, but let's not get carried away. Knuth spent 10 years working on TeX and he worked on what was then a fairly unchanging problem domain. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, many of the needs typesetters have today were (by Knuth's design) pushed into the macro system or the back-ends, thereby making the core of Knuth's work inherentlys stable. I think that many good developers today, given 10 years of receiving grants, and an unchanging problem set could write high-quality, very stable, very solid code, especially with a large community providing bug reports. To be clear, I celebrate Knuth's achievement, but I don't view it as a commentary on how software is written today.
zokier 13y ago
Sure you can just limit your projects scope, but essentially you are trading "software can do foo with bugs" to "software can not do foo at all". Like it or not, problem domains and world around them do evolve, and no software lives in an isolated bubble. Notorious examples related to typesetting would be Unicode and OpenType.

by julie1 13y ago

nailer 13y ago

Knuth's definition of 'bug' is a limited one, that seems to be mainly about logic errors. Allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document (which very few users actually wish to do in 2014) would be considered a bug in other typesetting software. This is actually a fantastic illustration of the gap between academic and industry concepts of computing.

nycticorax 13y ago
When exactly do you think allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document became a bug? It certainly wasn't when TeX was first written. Do you imagine it magically became a bug on a particular date? Also, isn't TeX limited to the .tex -> .dvi transformation? I'm not sure the transformation from .dvi to .ps/.pdf is even part of TeX proper. And that's where the bitmapped fonts come in. In summary, all of this may just be a fantastic illustration of the gap between Don Knuth and you.
- nailer 13y ago
  > When exactly do you think allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document became a bug? I was about to say: "Good question. At one point everyone who had access to a computer was a programmer, as using an OS required programming skills. As that slowly phased away, considering issues which lead users into bad paths, documentation errors, and usability issues as bugs became more common." Then I saw: > "Do you imagine it magically became a bug on a particular date?" and > In summary, all of this may just be a fantastic illustration of the gap between Don Knuth and you. Snark is unwelcome here. See http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - microtherion 12y ago
    But "Do you imagine it magically became a bug on a particular date?" is a fairly pertinent question, as one of the advantages of TeX is that you can still typeset manuscripts decades after they were published.
  - nycticorax 12y ago
    I apologize for the snark. But I thought that your first statement was questionable, and that therefore your second statement was rather facile. > Knuth's definition of 'bug' is a limited one, that seems to be mainly about logic errors. Allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document (which very few users actually wish to do in 2014) would be considered a bug in other typesetting software. Certainly, people sometimes use "bug" loosely, but it seems to me there is a strict sense in which a "bug" means something that was not intended by the writer of the code. And the issue you describe clearly does not fit this description. I would call what you describe a "design flaw", at best. But as I alluded to, it wasn't even a design flaw at the time it was introduced. So it's really more of an anachronism than anything else. And again, it's not really clear that it's even an anachronism in TeX, since it's more of an issue with the DVI-to-PS (or DVI-to-PDF) transformation. And then you went on to conclude, from this highly questionable chain of reasoning, that this "bug" is "a fantastic illustration of the gap between academic and industry concepts of computing". Which I just find galling. Here you're talking about one of the most celebrated computer scientists of all time, someone who is almost certainly a lot smarter than you (or I), and you chalk up a difference between what you and he call a bug to the difference between industry and academia. As if Knuth is just some kind of ivory-tower crackpot who wouldn't understand the real-world exigencies of industry. So: I think your definition of "bug" is highly questionable, and I think that in the future, when you find yourself in disagreement with some celebrated academic computer scientist, you should perhaps linger a bit longer on the possibility that you might be mistaken, rather than chalking it all up to the difference between industry and academia.
Shorel 13y ago
I disagree with calling a deprecated feature a bug. Oranges to apples.
- nailer 12y ago
  Last time I tried TeX was in the early 2000s, but I suspect it hasn't changed that much. At the time metafont pushed people into bitmap fonts, and using scalable formats was quite difficult.

dalke 13y ago

As Knuth's article points out, TeX had a bug, which has been fixed, and the fix could cause a .tex file from 1996 to give different output after the fix.

_delirium 13y ago

And we all claim that softwares always have bugs, and must evolve. Sometimes I think we are just justifying our own lack of dedication and hard work for a perfect design that is stable and does the whole job correctly since beginning. To give one example where TeX hasn't evolved, and which I think is a wrong decision rather than "perfect design": its Unicode handling is atrocious. Of course, this is because Unicode didn't exist when TeX was designed. But now it does. In fact it not only exists, but is the default text encoding on most contemporary machines. My locale is set to en_US.UTF-8, for example, and I'd therefore expect my toolchain, from grep through TeX, to be able to handle UTF-8 text. But TeX chokes on it. (Fortunately, the developers of pdfTeX aren't as averse to adding new features as Knuth is, so I've switched to that.)

ternaryoperator 13y ago

I share your admiration for Knuth, but let's not get carried away. Knuth spent 10 years working on TeX and he worked on what was then a fairly unchanging problem domain. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, many of the needs typesetters have today were (by Knuth's design) pushed into the macro system or the back-ends, thereby making the core of Knuth's work inherentlys stable. I think that many good developers today, given 10 years of receiving grants, and an unchanging problem set could write high-quality, very stable, very solid code, especially with a large community providing bug reports. To be clear, I celebrate Knuth's achievement, but I don't view it as a commentary on how software is written today.

zokier 13y ago

Sure you can just limit your projects scope, but essentially you are trading "software can do foo with bugs" to "software can not do foo at all". Like it or not, problem domains and world around them do evolve, and no software lives in an isolated bubble. Notorious examples related to typesetting would be Unicode and OpenType.