pouët.net

gargaj, didn't we meet already last year?

I think 3d in Microsoft Excel fits this thread :)

Almost forgot the basic compo of the alternative party!
http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=258&when=2004

First place: Excel macro (visual basic?) demo
3rd place: My favorite, best GwBasic demo I have ever seen. Didn't know it's possible :)

postscript == cancer

/yo { /rr 100 def /cxcx 0 def /cycy 0 def .7 setlinewidth 0 setgray
0 rr moveto
0 .25 360 30 mul { /i exch def /x i sin def /y i cos def
rr x mul cxcx add rr y mul cycy add lineto /cxcx
cxcx i .25 mul sin add def /cycy cycy i .25 mul sin sub def
.15 rotate } for
stroke
} def
300 400 translate yo

pure hate

i wrote peano curves in tex once, for an assigment. postscript must be lovely compared to the mess tex is...

PostScript *IS* lovely compared to the mess TeX is!

The two have nothing to do with each other. Postscript is a nice language.
TeX is a wonderful tool, one of the only "masterpieces" of computer science.

or rather computer engineering.

Try doing an asciidemo with a shellscript under linux. I'd love to see that done.
I really need to learn how to code. Maybe at breakpoint.

knos: call me newschool, but imho tex is *at most *as much a masterpiece as other old and rusty legacy stuff. say, second reality.

it aged horribly bad, and is a complete pile of poo if you compare it to most other tools and/or computer languages out there these days. i'm seriously completely and honestly amazed at the crowds of people (and highly educated people at that) who use it voluntarily.

bod: has been done.

skrebbel, since you have an opinion about it, I'd like to know what replacement system you are using.

TeX is used because it is the de facto standard. E.g. arxiv.org accepts only TeX, I think. There are similar, but arguably better typesetting systems out there, like Lout, it's a shame that nobody uses them.

bod, we wrote once a 4k in msdos batch

(skrebbel, highly educated people also tend you use awk... I would not comment that practice :)

knos, word 2007 of course.

And (La)TeX is not bad if you don't need custom macros for generating special diagrams, which holds for 98% of its users.

knos, btw, i do not actually mean to troll: if you havent tried word 2007 yet, i seriously recommend trying it out. it fixes many of the last things that latex clearly kicked word's butt with, like pretty decent bibliographies, an awesome equation editor which understands \sum and friends, real decent default markup and some non-sucking (yep, i'm not kidding) templates. oh and a real cool gui, but i guess that's heavily subject to taste.

in short, i'd happily buy it if i hadn't gotten it for free.

Word2007? I've not used it. So far I've not seen any text-output from word which actually looked typographically above TeX. Although this may have changed with word2007 (I do not care much for being up to date to the latest microsoft products, since my company could care less as well) yet I abhor binary formats for documents. I love having useful merge/diff tools available for documents.

Now as for competitors such as lout. Great in theory, yet in the end, do I really care so much about the quality of the typesetting system as a language? I'm not doning my programmer hat yet when writing documents, though I love having access to all kinds of nifty packages. What I care about is the quality of implementation (output), the fact it's programmable, but I don't need to write applications in it: I'm not judging its language with the same requirements of a language I'd write an application with.

If I want to explain a bit why I consider them masterpieces, I see METAFONT/METAPOST/TeX as great examples of an uncompromising eye to produce quality output, in a very pragmatic manner. A great example of how to withstand the test of time.

If Word had native LaTeX math-mode support for equations i'd use it directly.

LaTeX is a pain in the ass if you are supposed to follow some strict report-guidelines that happens to not be in article or report.

Indeed it's cool to be able to version control your documents.

knos, point taken. even though word 2007 documents seriously can look quite good with pretty little effort, i reckon they definitely do not beat latex at it. plus, if you're one of those people who really care that the dot on the "i" in "fi" is nicely connected to the f, yeah, then latex and friends is the only way. if you're willing to spend the extra time it takes to produce such a document, then i guess that's a fair deal. and also true that only now, 20 years or so after tex was pooped out, quality of word (and similar packages) documents starts to approach that of latex documents, is a pretty damn impressive feat.

stefan, without kidding, check out word 2007's equation editor. it's basically a wysiwyg latex math-mode except that you don't get to see the underlying tex source once you typed it. ms stole all the good ideas from tex here and implemented it really pretty decently.

ok, i'll stop my fanboy-talk now.

any demos in ada?

I once planned to do a small demo in ada as I had to learn that at university, but never got it done :-/

skrebbel: still, i cant paste mathematica expressions into it, right?