[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Herbert Schulz]

On Sep 29, 2010, at 6:58 PM, Alan Munn wrote:

> ...
> Now for some off topic continuation:
> 
> I would be willing to bet that *fewer* high school/college students have ever written a computer program now than 20 or 30 years ago.  Instead, what gets taught (if anything) is how to use (and I use that term loosely) some applications like Office and perhaps some Creative Suite type things. Programming isn't generally taught partially as a result of GUIs: it's a lot more complicated to write a even a simple program for a Mac or a PC running Windows than it was in the days of everything being command line driven.  In fact, despite my having written tens of thousands of lines of Fortran and (eek!) BASIC for engineering purposes on VMS/Sun machines and early PCs, the only software I've written lately is some ruby scripts. Why? I don't have much need to program my Mac, and I certainly don't have the time or inclination to learn how to write a GUI driven program, since it's not necessary for my day to day work.
> 
> Why should the average person need to learn to program a computer? It's like asking why they should learn to repair their fridge.  But of course when a student bumps up against TeX, they are confronted with many things which are truly out of their actual experience with computers (again, for most people).
> 
> Alan

Howdy,

Ahhh... while this seems to be getting further and further off topic I really agree with you here.

Coming from a Fortran and C procedural background my understanding of OOP is mostly by thinking of objects as structs with lots of function pointers, etc. I've played with TeXShop source but really have a hard time following what is happening; it's quite wonderful magic and things that sound really hard to do are easy while things that don't sound that hard to do are, in fact, difficult. I've only been writing configuration and shell scripts in the near term.

I have a nephew (x times removed?) that told me he took programming courses in High School and it turned out to be a class in using MS Office. Sigh...

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)