

Up and Running With LaTeX - by Alex Kahn - akahn
http://akahn.net/2010/05/13/latex.html

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cduan
All the points are good, but it always sounds a little weird to me when people
say things like "LaTeX is great because it handles hyphenation." The
hyphenation support is part of TeX, which is the programming language, not
LaTeX, which is a library built on the TeX language. It's kind of like saying
that Rails is great because it supports regular expressions.

Not that this distinction really matters when you use it, but it at least
gives credit where it's due (in this case, to Donald Knuth rather than Leslie
Lamport for the hyphenation algorithm, which is indeed a brilliant algorithm).

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akahn
Hey,

That's an important point, thank you. I definitely have had the experience of
wondering, "Is this something LaTeX provides, or is it from Memoir?" I guess I
should also have been asking myself what comes from LaTeX and what is already
part of TeX.

Your Rails analogy is apt, I definitely remember being a Rails n00b and not
knowing what was part of Ruby's standard library and what was provided by
ActiveSupport.

Cheers, Alex

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Bjoern
Every time I use LaTeX I remember what my prof. said to me. "I never could
understand why you need to program if you just want to type a document." Me:
"Uhhh, so we really _really_ have to use OpenOffice?" Prof: "Yes". My team
partner (windows guy): "Yay". Me: "Sign."

~~~
JadeNB
I guess your professor didn't have a web page, since that would have involved
programming HTML?

