🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jan23.213352.26105@m.cs.uiuc.edu> coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>ted@telematics.com (Ted Goldblatt) writes:
>>Perhaps he should have said "Secretaries in the *real* world".  It may
>>be that secretaries in academia or other sheltered (:-)) environments
>>actually use Unix and "our" tools, but out here, they use PCs (running
>>DOS, *maybe* with Windows) and some word processor, not emacs and a
>>document formatter.
>
>In this part of the "unreal world" (the University of Illinois CS
>Department) the secretaries are in the process of switching from
>emacs/TeX/unix to Macs running Microsoft Word et al. Unix and emacs were
>pretty much judged a) too complicated and b) not well-suited to the
>tasks required.

I'm not a great fan of emacs, but there are a number of simpler screen editors
available for unix. Tex also has its limitations but it is far from the only
unix formatter available. For some things good old fashioned ASCII is the
easiest.

On the flip side the lab I work in here has unix and a mac available. I
watched a grad student pulling his hair out for weeks because the mac's
friendly interface couldn't do what he wanted. At that point he really really
wished he had done his thesis using Latex, it would have taken some learning
but it would have saved him weeks in the end. 
My general opinion at this point is, if the software you need isn't available
for free write it, canned software is generally so limiting that it just isn't
worth the extra flashyness. I'd rather write software and give it away than
have to deal with the limitations in someones code that they won't allow you
to fix.

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