[Gllug] Trends in programming

[Nix]

On 11 Nov 2010, Walter Stanish uttered the following:

>>> Nomination for the best random modelling tool that people possibly
>>> haven't heard of - mscgen:
>>>   http://www.mcternan.me.uk/mscgen/
>>
>> Ooo, that looks nice. Another thing to add to graphviz, metapost and
>> xypic in my attempt to never ever have to diagram anything by hand.
>
> I use graphviz too where appropriate, which is almost-never.  When

It depends if you do a lot of stuff with graphs, I suppose :) since
I seem to think in DAGs all the time, it comes in handy a lot. I use
it instead of a sketchpad :)

> can use it to do protocol structure diagrams, ala TCP/IP Illustrated.
> You can achieve them by using type = record and 'cell1 | cell2 | cell3'
> in your output.

Ooo, lovely.

> Interesting, I hadn't heard of metapost or xypic, though the joy of

Metapost is excellent, a way to use the Metafont mathematical font
description language to draw pictures. xypic is... well, you can do
amazing stuff in it, but its syntax is absolutely horrific, worse by far
than paragons of readability such as sendmail.cf. Still, if you want to
do Feynman diagrams or diagrams in category theory or elaborate
multinoded twisting graphs in your LaTeX document, xypic is the thing,
shortly followed by a long trip to the psychologist for trauma
counselling.

> LyX 2.0 (still in beta) when set up with XeTeX (for TTF font support)

Exellent program!

> is guiding me further in to LaTeX these days.  I get the impression
> that much of TeX is used near-exclusively by academics of
> mathematics and closely related disciplines.

Absolutely: maths, theoretical physics and CS *run* on TeX. That's what
it was meant for, and that's what it's used for. (Also, those of us who
like typesetting use it anyway, because the output is just so damn
smooth.)

> Amusingly, when I showed a colleague mscgen who has a big history
> in programming graphics in TeX, he quipped "I could write that
> program in half an hour with TeX".

bwahaha!

> There's a lot of power in there... thanks, Mr. Knuth!

Don tried hard to keep TeX from becoming a programming language, and
almost succeeded. :)
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