per gli utenti Mac segnalo questa splendida intervista a Dick Koch, l’autore di TeXShop, dove racconta brevemente la storia di LaTeX su Mac OS X
Davvero straordinaria, concordo. Consiglio di leggerla a tutti gli utenti, Mac e no. Segnalo questi passi, che mi hanno colpito in modo particolare.
DW: I see from your university website that Apple gave you an award for TeXShop. Do you think TeXShop (and perhaps XeTeX) are increasing the popularity of the Mac for TeX use, particularly among mathematicians?
DK: No. Sometime between 1990 and 1995, TeX captured the mathematical world completely. It was a revolution. Before that revolution, mathematicians wrote in longhand and departments had a platoon of mathematical typists; after the revolution the typists were gone and virtually all mathematicians used TeX. I watched that revolution at the University of Oregon. At first our new hires all used TeX, sometimes on the Mac and sometimes on Linux machines. Soon the older faculty switched. At about the same time, graduate students switched to TeX for everything from quizzes to conference talks.
The last people to switch were older faculty. Often they made the change when they began a book project. But even here the revolution was conplete. I helped some of these faculty buy a new machine and answered questions about “cutting and pasting” for weeks. I thought to myself “if even the fundamentals of computing cause this much trouble, it will be hopeless to get this guy to learn TeX.” But after a few days explaining TeXShop or another program, I found that mathematicians take to TeX like ducks to water. It speaks their language. I got lots of computer support questions, but essentially never about TeX.
DW: I looked you up in the Mathematical Genealogy Project database and see that you are descended only a few generations from David Hilbert! This brought a question to mind. Do you think the availability of high quality mathematical typesetting has significantly changed mathematics or how it is done? Would someone like Bernoulli have been able to write more papers if he had TeX available to him, or was he better off without it?
DK: My previous comments apply here. I don’t think that Bernoulli would have written more, and to use the extreme case, I don’t think Euler would have written more. But I think they would have have seen TeX as a completely natural tool.
Grazie a Warsaw per la segnalazione.
Ciao,
L.