Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b...
by LeifCarrotson on Thursday May 28, 2020 @01:47PM
(#23340187)
I used LyX to write a pretty significant paper back in 1.6, a decade later Lyx is now on 2.3; I just installed it and opened my old research paper. Obviously, I haven't done a thorough test, but from 5 minutes poking around there's a huge improvement in appearance, documentation, and usability!
There's a similar story for the electronics design software package KiCAD - I played with that a bit in school as well, when it was more like a group of separate software packages duct-taped together with some import/export scripts. The enthusiasts weren't bothered by and seemed to actually enjoy the lack of polish. Recently, though, CERN has injected a bunch of money, programming time, and real-world use engineer's time into the project and it really shows.
I definitely agree that the NSF (or any major LaTeX-using organization) injecting a few million dollars into LyX would be an incredible boon to human productivity. I do feel that it would be better for an organization with internal consumers of the software to undertake this effort than for an outside team to just start with a blank canvas.
The latter too frequently ends up with the primary users being developers, where bug reports or feature requests will be responded to with "Just compile with -D FEATURE_ENABLE" or "For the syntax of that menu item, read the block comment and source code of the foo.cpp/bar() method" - basically, where TeX is right now. Most users of most software will install it with the Windows .exe, a few will use the .dmg/.deb/.rpm or their package manager: a vanishingly small subset are compiling it from source. And if you expect that your users should be able to read C++, your user base is going to very small.
There's a similar story for the electronics design software package KiCAD - I played with that a bit in school as well, when it was more like a group of separate software packages duct-taped together with some import/export scripts. The enthusiasts weren't bothered by and seemed to actually enjoy the lack of polish. Recently, though, CERN has injected a bunch of money, programming time, and real-world use engineer's time into the project and it really shows.
I definitely agree that the NSF (or any major LaTeX-using organization) injecting a few million dollars into LyX would be an incredible boon to human productivity. I do feel that it would be better for an organization with internal consumers of the software to undertake this effort than for an outside team to just start with a blank canvas.
The latter too frequently ends up with the primary users being developers, where bug reports or feature requests will be responded to with "Just compile with -D FEATURE_ENABLE" or "For the syntax of that menu item, read the block comment and source code of the foo.cpp/bar() method" - basically, where TeX is right now. Most users of most software will install it with the Windows .exe, a few will use the .dmg/.deb/.rpm or their package manager: a vanishingly small subset are compiling it from source. And if you expect that your users should be able to read C++, your user base is going to very small.