Religious wars and LaTeX tools

On his blog, Lance Fortnow recently mentioned that for several years he has been happily using Windows instead of Unix. This provoked a lot of fervent comments, some of which are pretty funny.

I try not to take sides in OS debates. I use a Windows PC at home because my wife and I occasionally need to take work home from the office, and that's what is used there. In my youth, I used to enjoy tinkering more with the hardware and software, and for a while I was using a dual-boot Windows and Linux setup. But nowadays I find the whole issue distracting. Computers have become a commodity in the economic sense, but not in a functional sense. When I use my computer, I want to be able to use it as a tool to do my work and not have to give a second thought about what OS I'm using, and how it needs to be tweaked to work properly with my applications, what security patches I need to apply, etc. Application software should be platform independent (to the extent possible), and data should be stored using open standard file formats. We have a long way to go to reach this point.

I really feel let down by Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy. It's been about 10 years since Java and the Internet Appliance were promoted as the solution to this problem, and I'm still waiting. They promised way too much, way too soon, and I think it really soured everyone on the whole idea. But now that broadband internet access is finally becoming widespread, maybe we'll see another attempt at popularizing this concept.

The one thing about the Java phenomenon that has kind of surprised me is that it was seen as primarily a boon for software developers and not hardware developers. I think this should be just the reverse: the JVM totally opens the door for hardware innovation. PCs get a little faster each year, but it's been a long time since we've seen anything truly new in PC hardware. Nor should we expect anything new. PC designers need to accomodate Windows' requirements, and that limits what the engineers can do. But once a critical mass of Java applications exists, the sky is the limit as far hardware is concerned. A JVM will need to be written for each new hardware platform, but this should not be too hard. All the applications, as well as the UI layers of the OS which are themselves written in Java, will immediately transfer to the new hardware. The performance improvements made possible by radically new hardware designs will easily outstrip any inefficiencies introduced by the VM layer. This has yet to happen on the desktop, but I think it is happening to some extent at the small end of the spectrum, in cellphones.

But I digress... Of the comments to Lance's post, of particular interest to me were several that described tools for using LaTeX on Windows. It was reassuring to see WinEdt described as being a nicer editor for handling LaTeX than the Unix-based Emacs (although this is probably not a majority opinion), since this is what I'm going to be using. WinEdt acts as a front-end to the MikTeX software package which does the actual typesetting.

WinEdt is a text-based editor; a couple of WYSIWYG editors were also mentioned in the comments. Scientific Workplace is a commercial package which, due to its high cost, is not an option for me. LyX is an open-source document processor which seems very interesting. Lyx was developed for Unix, but there is a Windows port available. I'm going to stick with WinEdt for now, mainly to force myself to learn LaTeX code, but perhaps in the future I'll take another look at using LyX.

While I'm on the subject of LaTeX, let me mention the books I plan on using to learn this. Learning LaTeX by David F. Griffiths and Desmond J. Highman, and First Steps in LaTeX by George Grätzer, are both tiny texts which promise to get me up and running quickly. I'll let you know how it goes.

My next post will be on graphics tools to provide diagrams for my LaTeX documents. In the meantime, if you have a favorite LaTeX program or book, please let me know!