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While this is half an answer to my post, I am incredibly put off by the tone and will not take a second look at your project. Yes, I know what a modern type sy
by Argorak 12y ago
While this is half an answer to my post, I am incredibly put off by the tone and will not take a second look at your project.
Yes, I know what a modern type system is and what merits it has. I also know that TeX has it's own fixed point math. But I am not convinced by your product either and this is certainly not helping. I do also now know that one of the authors is incredibly snobbish about his product, which I have a strong aversion against. And this is where I'll stop.
- pmeunier 12y agoYou're right, but then if your point was to start a discussion, maybe the best way to do it was not to start looking down at our project and assume that we are total ignorants who worked five years on something without any idea of what we were doing or what others did before. Your first comments were really offensive, but I recognize that the tone of my post also reflected the 95% of negativity in the comments I've heard since we started it, the vast majority of them without even looking at what we're trying to do (we've even had comments like "stop using your favorite text editor / version control system / operating system and use mine instead"!). What was your point in trying to destroy an embryo project? Didn't you expect such a reaction from their parents?
- Argorak 12y agoI think I see where this went of track and I think this is a grave misunderstanding. "The biggest hurdle in all those systems is understanding what typesetting actually is" Read it as: "The biggest hurdle in all those systems (for the user) is understanding what typesetting actually is" Many programmers approach TeX (and patoline?) as programming environments like programming languages. They are not, even if they allow to build new components (maybe using scripts). I wanted to illustrate the challenges from that perspective. I did not want to fundamentally criticize your ability to tackle those problems or imply that patoline is not fitting to those problems. My biggest problem was that the About page gave me no idea about your system as a typesetting system, only as a programming environment and some of that gives me a bit of a headache. This is by the way shared with many other projects, my pet peeve is a programming language that mentions it's own name only once on the About page and Haskell thrice ;). Be more self-centric! What is patoline, not compared to TeX? If you read anything else out of that - I am sorry for phrasing that wrong. Still, as a maintainer of a software that is often criticized in similar fashions (we build a web framework in Ruby that is not Rails), I would recommend to take the criticism as a less emotional matter. Software is rarely our actual baby and it often helps more to just discuss the actual points of the criticism or check whether there is a misunderstanding (this, in this instance, also applies to me). As a final word: Sorry for what came out of that. I understand your frustration and that you needed to write it off your chest. My reaction was a bit knee-jerk as well.
- pmeunier 12y agoOooooh! Ok, my mistake, sorry for the misunderstanding too. I agree that we should reformulate the website, that was written two years ago now. I'll try to do something, given all the comments on this discussion, including yours and others'.
- Argorak 12y agoGreat! Feel free to ping me on twitter, same username, when you have something. I'd really like to see it. Happy that this is settled, too.