Ask HN: Why are academics so reluctant to try out the latest apps in their work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are academics so reluctant to try out the latest apps in their work?

2 pointsamichail12 comments

The situation is particularly bad with CS and math academics who are still using TeX/LaTeX even though the vastly superior TeXmacs has been available for a long time now.

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Why are you using TeXmacs when the vastly superior https://www.overleaf.com/ is available?

I like WYSIWYG editing.

Any claim that something different is better have to be substantiated.

People know how to do write macros, automatically generate documents and do all sorts of things with LaTeX. Amazingly TeX even kerns properly which I can’t say for Adobe Illustrator never mind Microsoft Office.

You find plenty of people who think LibreOffice is OK, they might even convince a German state to try it. Later we will here they switched back to Microsoft Office because LibreOffice is not OK.

Although the WYSIWYG TeXmacs is not based on TeX (nor emacs), it was designed for people who use TeX/LaTeX and has similar capabilities.

Starting out with deception is a highly effective way to be dismissed out of hand.

With a name like that you would think it was an emacs major mode for TeX. People see right away it is being disingenous and they run away, they don’t walk. As our last president said of the 737 MAX, REBRAND!

Aren't academics smart enough to overlook the name and focus on the software itself, which is free and of very high quality?

Nope. They are more busy than you can imagine and don't have time to waste on things that aren't their specialties.

Assuming the product is as good as you say it might take them 40 hours to really evaluate it. The product might be free but their time isn't.

People have an expectation that GUI applications are bad, especially free ones. For instance, if you use Word much at all you would notice it is mysterious how the selections for "Bold", "Italic" and such work. It seems like your computer is possessed by the devil, fighting against you to select ranges of text in nonsensical ways. This isn't just a problem with Word but it is widespread in most applications that copy the same interface. (Like those HTML-in-HTML editors) I guess there is something broken about the conceptual model behind them; about once every other year I notice somebody else really gets it that there's a problem here, but most people seem to accept it unthinkingly.

The main TeXmacs author is a mathematician and the program has a very well thought out document model and editing operations.

You won't find strange/unpredictable Word editing heuristics here.

It's strange.

CS academics should be interested in the latest software — especially software that was difficult to write.

Why else did they major in computer science?

Computer Science is a vast field. Most software is not interesting in a computer science mindset.

The difference is partially attributed to science vs engineering. Even so, the latest software is rarely the best choice when the task is only tangentially related.

Now you're cooking with gas!

People in computer science write papers. Writing software is incidental to that.

In principle they are interested in reading the latest papers, but in no way are they going to spend time reading papers if it gets in the way of writing papers.

It's a distraction. The existing tool works good enough, and they have other more important things to do than learn a new tool.

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