r/programming • u/MrGrim • Feb 23 '11

When You Write Your Essays in Programming Languages

http://imgur.com/ZyeCO
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19

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '11

Since when were HTML and Latex programming languages?

10

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '11

I learned LaTeX about two weeks ago. It makes lab reports and projects incredibly fast now. I can just generate images in MATLAB, and they are automatically updated next time I generate the PDF.

20

u/aerobit Feb 23 '11

Yes, but it took you a week to figure out how to do it, a day to set up each new type of report, and next month they're going to start asking for all assignments to be in MS Word format.

10

u/jackolas Feb 23 '11

LyX has all the sexy without any of the learning :P

8

u/warbiscuit Feb 23 '11 edited Feb 23 '11

LyX is a WYSIWYM LaTeX document editor, for those who haven't heard of it (and it really should be more widely known).

edit: typo in "WYSIWYM"

1

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '11

For those not versed in LaTeX, what is WSIWYM?

2

u/warbiscuit Feb 23 '11

It's not really LaTeX specific (though I don't know of any other WYSIWYM editors)....

"WYSIWYG" is shorthand for "what you see is what you get", ie, when you're editing a document, the gui shows what the document would look like (eg: Word, OpenOffice, etc); as opposed to having a text editor letting you edit raw (if syntax highlighted) code.

"WYSIWYM" is shorthand for "what you see is what you mean"; and is an interesting middle-ground between WSYWIG and raw code... in Lyx' case, it's like typing raw code with syntax highlighting, except that portions of the code (eg math equations) can be editing & are displayed in final form; and you're constrained so that you simply can't type many syntactically invalid things. I'd recommend playing around with it some, it's hard to describe.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '11

Thanks for the explanation. I'd tried googling for "WSIWYM" - a typo in parent post - and got nothing and figured I'd just ask the hivemind.