January 18, 2015

They could have moved it to Fiction

Christian books retailers are pulling the "Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" because what is written in the book is not true. If the trend continues, retailers fear they will be out of books to sell in the near future.

January 5, 2015

Latex, Word and Tool Adoption

So there is a paper out there comparing Word and Latex productivity (An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development), and concludes that "scholarly journals should request authors to submit their documents in Word or PDF format". In their experiments, for all tasks except equations, a Word novice was a bit better on average than a Latex expert.

Although I use Word for writing scientific articles, I do prefer the Latex approach, it seems it is easier to reuse parts of Latex documents and classes. However, where are Word-level tools for Latex? I've been considering writing an article in Latex, but I haven't found a good-enough tool yet.

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This article sparked a small discussion in the workplace, about tool adoption, laziness and comfort zones. Unfortunately, in the internet of cool technologies and trendy communities, sometimes people lose sight of the advantages of mature technologies.

Several years ago, I realized that if I wanted to be good on a programming language, I should pick just one and seriously invest on it. I chose Java, as at the time it seemed a good future-proof bet, and several years later, have not regretted it. Mind you, I still pay attention to what's going on around (e.g., just started using Gradle), however it is really difficult to understand, from users and enthusiasts discussions, which tools and technologies will give you a real improvement on your work.

It wouldn't be so hard if new technology advocates wouldn't overlook so easily the advantages of more mature technologies: libraries, tooling/IDEs, support, long-term maintenance, team work, etc... until you realize that since they are defending new technologies, all those points are current disadvantages for them, and it really is better to ignore them. I was shocked when I discovered that Scala, after more than 10 years, does not have binary compatibility between versions (every 6 months, your binaries might not work if you update to the most recent version - but well, at least, they are paying attention to it).

In any case, if you are not using the latest technology or the trendiest programming language, don't worry, contrary to what people have been telling you, you might be doing the right thing.