Re: Why I am unwilling to use Mathematica if I can help it

In article <db1bnf$16cq@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Herman Rubin
<hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
....
> Another beef is with the requirement for long expressions
> such as "FullSimplify" and "IndentingNewLine". I can
> program far faster than I can type the program.

This is the new (? 30 years+) orthodoxy: full descriptive names. I
suppose it's better than "ls | rm". (I choose this specifically
because it DOESN'T work, just in case someone tries it.)

The point is that short names are quicker, and when you're immersed in
a project, more efficient. But come back two months later...

--Ron Bruck

PS. When Wolfram was touring the country hyping the "new"
Mathematica--I think it was at version 3?--I recall him making claims
like, Mathematica's typesetting capabilities were superior to TeX's,
and implying that Mma would replace TeX. Ha. Another aspect of
Wolfram's "mine is bigger" mindset. Ah, if only they had made TeX the
underlying typesetter! We might now have something like "Display TeX"
instead of "Display PostScript".

Instead, we're stuck with the constantly recurring problem of a label
in Greek, say, which looks fine in Mathematica, but comes out in
Courier when translated to PDF. Sigh.

Yes, we DO need our own display language. Meanwhile, instead of
Unicode being the default [the bare minimum that we need], we're still
stuck with 7-bit ascii. Maybe even 6-bit :-(
.

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