[HN Gopher] MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has go...
___________________________________________________________________
MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of
business
Author : uger
Score : 200 points
Date : 2021-07-13 11:33 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mackichan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mackichan.com)
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| The sibling thread I was going to reply in has been deleted, but
| I wanted to share what I learned this morning, as a young-blood
| who was hardly alive at the time:
|
| a. Laptops of the time sport specs that assure me they'd be
| perfectly capable of proforming the majority of tasks I engage in
| on my computer, and education especially sets a low bar; I'm sure
| they could run a terminal, CLI text editor, calculator,
| interpreters, and Wikipedia like any modern PC (thanks to
| Wikipedia for staying accessible!). Selfies simply aren't the
| most important thing.
|
| b. According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcam
|
| > The released in 1993 SGI Indy [sic] is the first commercial
| computer to have a standard video camera
|
| > The first widespread commercial webcam, the black-and-white
| QuickCam, entered the marketplace in 1994 [ . . . ] $100
|
| > The first widely known laptop with integrated webcam option, at
| a pricepoint starting at US$ 12,000, was an IBM RS/6000 860
| laptop and his ThinkPad 850 sibling, released in 1996.
|
| > Around the turn of the 21st century, computer hardware
| manufacturers began building webcams directly into laptop and
| desktop screens, thus eliminating the need to use an external USB
| or FireWire camera.
|
| So, yes! Idk exactly what OP had, but if laptops of the time were
| starting to include built in webcams, and could run a 20fps
| webcast, then they could certainly "take and share selfies and
| video". Interestingly, 2000 was also the year of the first
| Presidential Webcast in the US, though I'm pretty sure Clinton
| didn't stream it from his iBook.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I used Scientific Word to write my dissertation and my first
| academic papers. It was a great piece of software in the late
| 1990s, at least relative to the alternatives, which were writing
| .tex files yourself or typing in a word processor. I have a
| coauthor that still uses SW.
|
| I can't say this is surprising. I moved to LyX long ago, and then
| after markdown became popular I ditched LyX and went with that.
| There are lots of strong alternatives today. There probably
| aren't many people willing to pay for something they can get for
| free, that they already have, or that doesn't provide features
| for collaboration.
| SloopJon wrote:
| How does Markdown fill the niche of TeX or Scientific Word? Is
| there a mathematically oriented fork? You mentioned R Markdown
| in another comment, but I don't see anything in the gallery
| that looks germane.
| dunham wrote:
| pandoc will turn markdown with TeX formatted equations into
| PDF or html (relying on tex and mathjax, respectively). It
| can also turn it into TeX if you need to tweak stuff.
|
| A number of other systems like Obsidian (for note taking) use
| markdown and integrate MathJaX or KaTeX to render TeX
| formatted equations.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Pandoc includes math support out of the box. R Markdown is
| actually built on top of Pandoc. I know many academics that
| write their papers in (Pandoc) markdown and then convert to
| PDF. It creates an intermediate .tex file that is then
| converted to PDF.
| madengr wrote:
| This trend is accelerating; small, one person companies founded
| near the beginning of personal computing are shutting down.
|
| Others that come to mind are MicroCAP for SPICE simulation, WRCAD
| for IC layout.
| simonh wrote:
| MacKichan Software was founded in 1981.
|
| MicroCAP was launched in 1982.
|
| Stephen R. Whiteley who wrote WRCAD is 66.
|
| I suppose there's only so long a one person company can go on
| for.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _I suppose there 's only so long a one person company can
| go on for._
|
| These were my thoughts exactly.
|
| These people got a an entire career out of independently
| working on software they (presumably) enjoyed developing. And
| if they open source it, the product lives on. It's not sad,
| it's great! Some of us should be so lucky.
| airbreather wrote:
| Is it due to the market, or the owners are retiring/giving up?
| scrdhrt wrote:
| My father (67, retired) has a couple of friends his age with
| long time, small businesses in the IT industry. One has been
| making some sort of map software for a very small niche in
| the marine industry, another has been making software for bee
| keepers or something similar. A third in image scanning
| software. They have been doing well since the late 80s, and
| still could be. They chose to go out of business and enjoy
| retired life instead.
|
| I suspect that, although there is a market for the products,
| noone is interested in taking on the software they worked on.
| lowercased wrote:
| > I suspect that, although there is a market for the
| products, noone is interested in taking on the software
| they worked on.
|
| It may be extremely difficult to do that, for at least a
| few reasons.
|
| In some cases, the tech is going to be very niche/old, and
| it will be difficult for people to get up to speed on it.
|
| The business is likely built on a lot of personal contacts,
| and not all will want to switch to some 'newcomer'.
|
| Many of these smaller business reliant on niche software
| will go out of business themselves, or be acquired by
| larger companies that will replace the niche software and
| process with something else.
|
| The current customers may not actually want anything other
| than regular updates while paying minimal
| support/maintenance contracts. Someone established can live
| off that, but someone new will have to spend a lot of time
| learning, and the income may not be sufficient to justify
| all the learning.
|
| I worked on a project in 2018 where some of the (small)
| company was still running on a combination of foxpro/db2,
| with a bunch of custom code by an indie/solo vendor who had
| 'retired' probably 5 years earlier. He'd 'sold' the company
| to another individual who ... kept it going, but couldn't
| easily deal with new needs (new reports, etc). Another
| vendor did an upgrade on the hosting server, and nothing
| worked after that. The upgrade was a base NT upgrade, and
| there wasn't any easy way to 'go back' quickly. Things ran
| off an RDP session to a laptop in Canada running some weird
| trial emulation tool under windows 7 (this was how it was
| translated to me from various parties).
| jaclaz wrote:
| Well, if I may, there is something that doesn't sound (to
| me) "rational".
|
| I have seen quite a few of these cases where a larger
| company buys the old one (essentially to get a list of
| their current customers) and then terminates the product
| replacing it with some crappy new stuff that usually
| completely fails to work, but in this case the soon-to-
| retire programmer at least gets some (little) money (and
| knowledge is lost forever).
|
| But if the one man company is going to shut down because
| the programmer is going to retire, the acquisition cost
| for a young, willing programmer is 0.
|
| This hypothetical young programmer could - I believe -
| invest some time to understand not so much the actual
| codebase, but rather the workflow of the program and re-
| write it along that same workflow in a new
| language/platform/whatever.
|
| I am pretty sure that those niche users would be ready to
| pay a fair amount of money to have something
| modern/updated that actually works and works like the old
| one.
|
| What I have seen often is that the new program, for no
| real reason, has been written by someone that most
| probably is much more brilliant at programming but that
| knows nothing about how the program is actually used, has
| no idea about how to deal with some "edge" cases (that
| already surely happened in the tens of years of life of
| the old software), etc., in some ways it is like all the
| experience accumulated over the years is suddenly lost
| and the new program repeats the same (or worse)
| mistakes/issues that already happened (and that were
| already solved).
|
| Maybe the problem is that there is not an easy way to
| tell to the world "I am going to retire, any taker?"
| lowercased wrote:
| > This hypothetical young programmer could - I believe -
| invest some time to understand not so much the actual
| codebase, but rather the workflow of the program and re-
| write it along that same workflow in a new
| language/platform/whatever.
|
| > I am pretty sure that those niche users would be ready
| to pay a fair amount of money to have something
| modern/updated that actually works and works like the old
| one.
|
| I don't know. My experience is, for many smaller niche
| things, they're entrenched in orgs and used The One Way,
| and any deviation - change a button label, add a menu,
| etc - will result in a lot of complaints from existing
| users. They'll have to 'retrain', etc.
|
| No doubt _some_ people will appreciate and welcome
| 'new/modern' stuff, but many won't. And figuring that out
| ahead of time is... time. and effort. And along with
| that, there's usually heaps of institutional/domain
| knowledge that just can't be replaced without... time in
| the trenches.
|
| It's not that it's not possible, it's just not typically
| 'worth it' for most people. ROI is too low compared to
| other options.
| handrous wrote:
| > I don't know. My experience is, for many smaller niche
| things, they're entrenched in orgs and used The One Way,
| and any deviation - change a button label, add a menu,
| etc - will result in a lot of complaints from existing
| users. They'll have to 'retrain', etc.
|
| People hate this just as much in almost any software (or,
| most any UI, physical or virtual, for that matter), they
| just often don't have a way to push back.
|
| You wouldn't know it based on current trends, but
| consistency and predictability are king in user
| interfaces, as far as _actual_ usability goes. So much so
| that high levels of severe bugginess can be preferable
| than less-severe and common bugginess, if the former is
| _consistent and predictable_ ( "if I press this button
| then that one, the application will crash or glitch,
| every single time, no matter what state the program is in
| --so, I won't do that") and the latter isn't ("about once
| a day this button takes me to the wrong screen, and the
| behavior seems random"). If your users are your top
| priority, changes will occur gradually, and only with
| _excellent_ motivation. Grand re-designs are among the
| most user-hostile things you can do (despite their
| popularity).
|
| [EDIT] to be clear, they don't have a way to push back in
| the modern age of rolling updates and old versions being
| infeasible to obtain at all, possibly broken even if you
| can, and, most likely, full of known vulnerabilities that
| will never be patched. In the old days of desktop
| software that you actually purchased, and that operated
| just fine entirely offline, the way to push back was not
| to upgrade, and it was common.
| lowercased wrote:
| The other pushback, in the context of the 'indie/solo'
| niche software stuff, is to actually call or email the
| original person and complain.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Yes, that young, entrepreneurial programmer can be found,
| but won't have the domain knowledge. Look at the examples
| above. You can't sell Marine mapping software without
| knowing something about marine navigation. You can't sell
| beekeeping software without understanding beekeeping.
| Plus you need the general business operation skills.
| Finding a programmer who knows beekeeping and wants to
| take on a low growth business is not as easy as finding a
| programmer on Upwork.
| lowercased wrote:
| Yep. There may be 'takers', but will the existing
| customers want to work with them? So many solo/indie
| niche packages are built on the relationships, and
| replacing those - and the trust around them - is hard.
|
| A client told me about someone they knew who did ballroom
| dancing software - it kept track of competitions,
| standings, etc. And... it seemed like decent money,
| looking at the pricing, and the size of the market. But
| the market didn't seem big enough for multiple players,
| and everyone trusted/knew/used the one main player.
| If/when he goes (or perhaps already has), I'm sure people
| will find another way to manage their stuff, but before
| then... who's going to come in to a market like that? How
| do you 'beat' the incumbent? Lower price? Who would
| switch? How do you convince people to switch to something
| unknown, potentially losing years of data, having new
| training costs, to ... save a couple hundred bucks maybe?
|
| I'm sure there's hundreds of these sorts of services out
| there that are surviving, but don't have a huge market
| for competition, because the barriers to entry are too
| high relative to the return.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Yes, but I was talking more about "passing on" the
| knowledge/experience (as opposed to losing it and start
| anew).
|
| Regarding your "The One Way", sometimes that one way is
| actually the one that works better, as it was developed
| and fine tuned over the years by a dedicated programmer
| that had constant feedback by users.
|
| Probably that ballroom dancing software had a way to
| input (or present/output) data in a form that makes sense
| to the users.
|
| When suddenly comes the new (otherwise brilliant)
| programmer that - knowing nothing on the specific field -
| invents his/her own way to input data or render it that
| the users find awkward or slower or less intuitive or
| _whatever_ , with the new program that cannot import old
| data (or imports partially), that cannot use the same B&W
| printer because the output is highlighted with colours
| and not with bolding/underlining, etc..
|
| No surprise that the users of the old software (if it is
| still working) won't jump on the new bandwagon.
| madengr wrote:
| The latter. Profitable enough to make a living from, but not
| profitable enough (in these days) to be purchased and
| sustained.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Especially in an era of very high programmer salaries.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| First we need to understand if there is a trend and if it is
| accelerating.
|
| If so, it feels like "retirement" is a good first guess at
| why.
| asah wrote:
| why not sell the business? too much hassle to operate?
| someone surely would want it...
| tibbetts wrote:
| One person businesses often require a unique collection
| of skills to operate and don't make enough money to hire
| a team of professional operators. This is also true of
| traditional small businesses like restaurants and car
| mechanics. The phenomenon is discussed extensively in the
| "E-myth" series of books. The TLDR is if you ever want to
| get someone else to run your business, you have to be
| careful to systematize and document how it works.
| catmanjan wrote:
| Pretty sure restaurants and car mechanics aren't unique
| skills and when they retire in my area someone usually
| buys them out and continues operating under the same
| name...
| _jal wrote:
| The properties already converted for specific use, so it
| is cheaper to reuse as much as possible.
|
| But those will be different businesses. The restaurant
| will not make the same dishes or retain the same
| customers. The mechanic will operate on different types
| of vehicles.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| From what I recall from reading one of the "E-myth" books
| a while ago, whether the newly-owned shop will operate
| similarly to the old one, and also how difficult was it
| for the original owners to sell it, will depend on the
| documentation GP mentioned.
|
| Going from my memory, "E-myth" book(s) insist on
| thoroughly documenting operating procedures and turning
| them into playbook. Rigid in terms of personnel training,
| but open to change if someone figures out an improvement.
| The goal is to be able to scale up operations into
| multiple venues (franchise models) while maintaining
| highly consistent appearance and level of quality.
|
| As much as having such documentation will make it easier
| for a franchisee to get the business running (the books
| call it "turn-key business", IIRC), it will also make it
| easier for a potential buyer to take over and immediately
| hit the ground running.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| I relate to this. 1 person company means getting the job
| done. As soon as you have 2 people you really need 3. One
| to do the labor, the other to schedule and
| bill(receptionist). If it's a physical company you need
| more space. Some software charges by person too.
|
| If something gets cancelled, the 1 person company takes a
| few hours off. Your 3 person company still needs to get
| their weekly paychecks.
|
| Whenever I hear calls for raises to minimum wage to
| absurd(?) levels (20$/hr), I think that this company will
| never be able to grow past 1 person. You can pay for a
| receptionist if you are a big corp with many employees,
| but it's really hard when you are going from 1 person to
| 3. We'd even let the receptionist do full WFH and just
| answer phones so they can watch their kids.
|
| "I guess we don't deserve to be in business".
|
| And the big corporation who gives 60% of our service
| conquers the industry.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| There are companies that provide receptionists as a
| service.
| aynyc wrote:
| People buy restaurants and car shops mainly because of
| licensing such as alcohol and zoning laws. It's rare for
| a specialty shop to be sold unless the owner has an
| apprentice.
| ludamad wrote:
| "We expect to make Scientific Word an open source product
| eventually. Since both Scientific WorkPlace and
| Scientific Notebook contain the proprietary computer
| algebra system MuPAD, they cannot be made open source.
| When the open source project for Scientific Word is
| established, an announcement will be made here."
|
| It looks like they just hope for it to be continued as
| open source - except for the part The Mathworks Inc. owns
| anyway
| TheFreim wrote:
| > small, one person companies founded near the beginning of
| personal computing are shutting down.
|
| It could also be that they didn't appropriately expand, or
| expanded too much.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| If it is due to retirement, the other employees might not be
| able to take over the product if it has been a 1 person show.
| I know of similar software where if the main developer were
| to leave, I have zero confidence they could do much besides
| maintenance. It isn't just the code, but having the
| mathematical understanding of the problem.
|
| Also, without looking at this in general, I wonder if it's
| hard to compete with Mathematica which is ~$1000 for a
| professional license (very reasonable in the industry
| compared to most others) or free on raspberry pi with free or
| near free for most students. Also, there is open source
| software as well that could eat into their niche.
| padthai wrote:
| Mathematica is at least ~$1.5k/year, ~$3k if you want only
| the desktop application, no WolframAlpha-like features.
| Licenses on the desktop are not per user, but per machine
| (8 core limitation). If you want to move the installation
| to another machine, you have to send them a signed document
| and contact Wolfram (the company, not the person). I could
| go on all day about the friction and restrictions.
|
| They have an excellent and unique product and I would love
| to pour them money (between me and my employer we pay about
| EUR 1000 /year to Intellij, and this is only one provider).
| But for some reason I do not feel comfortable between the
| immense power imbalance between them and myself. It makes
| me uneasy to invest in the ecosystem.
|
| I wonder how many clients they have their CAP users in the
| academic world.
| xvilka wrote:
| In the age of Jupyter, Pluto.jl, SageMath, LaTeX/Overleaf Wolfram
| (for rich) who needs this? Better to spend time and resources
| improving those.
| codebolt wrote:
| Do any of those have a CAS which is as powerful and easy to use
| as Scientific Notebook/Workplace?
| xvilka wrote:
| Of course they are. Sage Math and Wolfram Mathematica are
| top-notch.
| qurashee wrote:
| Upon reading this article I thought I should check the fate of
| one of my favourite astronomy software (SkyMap). Looks like it
| had the same fate last year, Chris Marriott (the sole developer)
| decided to retire. I don't really get though why shut up shop and
| not open source such one man projects :(
| [deleted]
| amichail wrote:
| Will everyone switch to TeXmacs, which is truly WYSIWYG and does
| not use TeX/LaTeX?
|
| See: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html
| mr_gibbins wrote:
| I doubt it, since in academia there are two gods, Word and
| LaTeX. It is very rare to find journals/conferences who don't
| specify one template or the other (with the possible exception
| of ACM, who are a law unto themselves). TexMacs might be OK for
| final preparation of camera-ready PDFs but by that point you're
| already invested in Word/LaTeX so there's no point switching
| typesetter.
| amichail wrote:
| TeXmacs is better than Word for documents containing math.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Given that Word does LaTeX math, why would that be?
| amichail wrote:
| In TeXmacs, switching between math and non-math mode
| while writing up a document is seamless and fast.
| Moreover, typesetting quality is comparable to TeX/LaTeX.
| syntaxfree wrote:
| The math equations made by Word have a distinctive
| appearance. Partly because they're objectively worse in
| some (a few) aspects, partly because people associate
| them with Word, the result feels amateurish. This isn't
| purely an intrinsic technical quality of Word, it's just
| how the cookie crumbles.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| > The math equations made by Word have a distinctive
| appearance.
|
| Try and use the GUST fonts
| (http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry), Microsoft
| Word equations will look then excellently made. The last
| time I used the GUST fonts, by the way, I was able to
| export Word documents to pdf only be printing, as using
| the pdf converter some glyphs would "lose pieces"; and
| exporting via printing I would lose the clickable links.
| But I did not try with the Word plugin for the latest
| versions of Acrobat.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Word does a _subset_ of LaTeX, badly. For anything after
| high school, the limitations of it are painfully,
| painfully apparent.
| asdf_snar wrote:
| Writing math in Word has the following disadvantages:
|
| - referencing is a nightmare (this is probably the worst
| aspect). \label and \ref or \eqref? No, remember the
| equation number, click the References tab, Cross-
| Reference, select "equation" from the "Reference type"
| dropdown list, scroll down to the equation whose number
| you should remember, click "Insert". Did you add
| remove/an equation, thereby changing all subsequent
| equation numbers? Let's hope "Update all fields" works on
| the first try (hint: it won't).
|
| - AMS math standards, \mathbb{R}, \mathcal{R}? No,
| \doubleR, \scriptR.
|
| - \bar{x}? No, \bar SPACE SPACE left-arrow x right-arrow.
|
| - \begin{align*}? No, good luck. (Actually I haven't even
| figured this one out).
|
| - Version control? No, "Track changes". Oh, you changed a
| subscript or superscript? Your file is corrupted and
| cannot be saved, Ctrl-z until you can save and hope you
| remember all your changes.
|
| - Seamless math typing if you are fast and proficient at
| LaTeX? No, Alt+= and hold on while I catch up. Did you go
| too fast? Sorry, Word has stopped responding. (This is a
| real problem in a 50+ page Word document full of math.)
|
| Those are just the ones off the top of my head.
|
| +1 for TeXmacs being superior to both Word and LaTeX.
| After using LaTeX for years I tried TeXmacs for a week
| and never looked back.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The secret is to revert back to Draft/Normal mode and
| abandon the performance regressions from print preview
| mode. Word was never designed to use that as the primary
| editing view.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| It's also just a tiny subset of LaTeX commands and not
| real LaTeX. I use the bm package to make things bold and
| I can't use that in Word. It doesn't support \begin{} and
| \end{} for any environment so for stuff like matrices you
| need to use special Word syntax \matrix{}.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| It will take a bit.
|
| I think that there are good points in switching document
| preparation system. Differently from LaTeX, TeXmacs can be
| programmed in a sensible way (it uses Scheme), and
| differently from Word you have access to the source. It is
| superior enough to both systems that the future standard will
| work according to the ideas implemented in it, I think.
| pvaldes wrote:
| There is a terrific tool, and people is trying hard to avoid
| using it? I can't see any advantage in not using TeX/LaTex
| versus using it.
| amichail wrote:
| The editing experience is horrendous compared to TeXmacs.
| pvaldes wrote:
| But the powerhorse difference, oh. It plays in a really
| different league.
|
| I enjoy emacs a lot also, so is a two lose moves in one
| step
| mgubi wrote:
| You do not know what are you talking about clearly. What
| is "this powerhosrse difference"? What in your opinion is
| possible with one tool but not with the other?
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| It's a pity it's called "TeXmacs" when, as you say, it really
| has no connection to TeX (except the ability to typeset
| mathematics).
|
| Another alternative is LyX, which actually does use LaTeX. Even
| that is not really a "LaTeX editor" though: it produces/exports
| excellent LaTeX, and uses that for typesetting, but does pretty
| poorly at _importing_ LaTeX (as the developers freely admit).
| Depending on your situation that may or may not be a problem:
| if you just have to give a journal the final result in LaTeX
| then you can use LyX to produce it, but if you want to
| collarboratively work on a paper with someone else who wants to
| use raw LaTeX then it wouldn 't be suitable. I wrote my masters
| thesis, course notes, and PhD thesis in LyX and would strongly
| recommend it - although it's a GUI I would argue it has a
| stronger learning curve than raw LaTeX, but leaves you more
| productive in the end.
| [deleted]
| Breza wrote:
| LyX is a truly underrated piece of software. It was my entry
| point into LaTeX.
| syntaxfree wrote:
| Re: lyx as a hard to get into GUI.
|
| Overleaf has decent tab completion and dozens of templates,
| as well as limited support for markdown. Let tabnine and
| copilot get to LaTeX; I think we'll find the discoverability
| of "text language on Adderall" outguns GUIs.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| My main "for" point towards GUIs is that one is able to
| read back easily what one wrote. On the other hand, to read
| comfortably a LaTeX equation I have to compile it; then for
| editing I have to move my attention back and forth from the
| compiled document to the source. (corrected a mistype)
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| It's mainly tables and to some extent figures that are
| intrinsically harder to read when written in TeX. The
| bulk of the text is just _text_ , so if that's hard to
| read that's down to your editor settings.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| I have an example on-hand for that---it is also
| equations, look at this, I need to compile it to
| understand it (it needs the amsmath package):
| { \def \l {\mathrm{l}} \def \r
| {\mathrm{r}} \def \Bl {\mathrm{Bl}}
| \def \Br {\mathrm{Br}} \def \B {\mathrm{B}}
| \def \nIIom {n_{2\omega}}
| \begin{equation}\label{eq:interface_conditions}
| \begin{aligned} F_{1\l} &= F_{2\r} +
| F_{2\l} \exp (i\,k_2 L) + F_{\Br} + F_{\Bl} \exp(i\,k_\B
| L) \\ F_{1\r} &= -\nIIom \,
| F_{2\r} + \nIIom \, F_{2\l} \exp (i\,k_2 L) - \nIIom \,
| F_{\Br} + \nIIom \,
| F_{\Bl} \exp(i\,k_\B L)\\ F_{3\r}
| &= F_{2\r} \exp (i\,k_2 L) + F_{2\l} + F_{\Br}
| \exp(i\,k_\B L) + F_{\Bl} \\ -F_{3\l}
| &= \nIIom \, F_{2\r} \exp (i\,k_2 L) + \nIIom \, F_{2\l}
| - \nIIom \, F_{\Br}
| \exp(i\,k_\B L) + \nIIom \, F_{\Bl}
| \end{aligned} \end{equation} }
|
| (by the way the formula may contain some math mistakes---
| it is supposed to represent interface conditions for a
| system of waves in a nonlinear optical medium---but it is
| good enough for showing the editing point)
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Just to add to that, your example would be even worse if
| you didn't have the macros at the beginning:
| F_{1\mathrm{l}} &= F_{2\mathrm{r}} + F_{2\mathrm{l}} \exp
| (i\,k_2 L) + F_{\mathrm{Br}} + F_{\mathrm{Bl}}
| \exp(i\,k_\mathrm{B} L) ...
|
| The obvious objection is that of course most people do
| use macros. But that's the point: every LaTeX document
| ends up being its own impenetrable language.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Ok, equations can get much trickier, but I don't think
| this is example too bad, you didn't even write a single
| multiline nested fraction.
|
| On the other hand, you don't write complicated
| mathematical equations quickly if you've got any sense
| anyway.
| Breza wrote:
| I hadn't even considered the potential power of TabNine in
| LaTeX! That could be a gamechanger for routine stuff.
|
| And I second your endorsement of Overleaf. I had to write a
| research proposal a few weeks back for work after not
| touching academic writing for 7 years. Overleaf made the
| process relatively painless.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > I think we'll find the discoverability of "text language
| on Adderall" outguns GUIs
|
| No way. Nothing can outgun typing a parameter into a box
| rather than the visual clutter of braces (or some other
| delimiter). What's more, maths notation often involves
| objects of different sizes, which isn't reflected in _any_
| fixed-width text language. Equations in my PhD were often
| 80% about the subscripts /superscripts if you read the raw
| LaTeX, with the most important stuff buried away; but when
| you look at the equation as rendered, or in a GUI, the most
| important bits are trivial to read off.
|
| > lyx as a hard to get into GUI
|
| I only suggest LyX is hard to get into because some people
| only get into it at a surface level, which it's actually
| very easy to get into but then you don't get all the
| benefits of LaTeX. Best case scenario is you know both
| LaTeX and how to use LyX, then you can spend 1% of your
| time writing bits of LaTeX (in the preamble, or using math
| macros [1], or directly including the odd snippet of raw
| LaTeX as a last resort (even then put them within an
| instant preview)) and 99% of your time using the GUI.
|
| [1] https://www.lyx.org/VisualTour#toc6
| tobmlt wrote:
| When I was getting to know LaTeX I would use LyX as a
| quick reference guide. Nice to have so much LaTeX info
| offline.
|
| Basically the reverse of your usage as the learning went
| on, and then finally going to pure LaTeX sometime in the
| foggy past.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> It's a pity it's called "TeXmacs" when, as you say, it
| really has no connection to TeX
|
| Yep. It sounds like something that ties emacs and LaTeX
| together. That's not something I'd even want to look at, and
| have not for exactly that reason. My goto math tool is
| Maxima, but I don't write so typesetting isn't a thing for me
| - it does support MathML though IIRC.
| amichail wrote:
| TeXmacs doesn't use emacs either.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Oh Lord, who thought that name was good
| mgubi wrote:
| Well, I guess that if you use "Python" you expect to
| really have to deal with a snake then.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I understand that "the python programming language"
| probably doesn't involve snakes. On the other hand, "the
| TeXmacs math typesetting software" doesn't obviously not
| involve LaTeX and isn't obviously not for emacs.
| rob74 wrote:
| Interestingly, the "X" in LyX is not pronounced the same way
| as the "X" in TeX/LaTeX. Would have been a nice pun, but they
| probably didn't want to have any "resurrected"/"undead"
| associations.
|
| OTOH, Wikipedia informs me that "Lich" is actually pronounced
| "'lItS", so the pun wouldn't have worked anyway. I was
| pronouncing the "ch" like the one in "Leiche" in German until
| now. Oh well...
| GiovanniP wrote:
| > does pretty poorly at _importing_ LaTeX
|
| As far as I know, an importer that interprets arbitrary LaTeX
| cannot exist (i.e. you have to run LaTeX on the file) because
| the grammar of LaTeX documents is Turing-complete. There is a
| StackExchange Q&A where this is explained, but I do not
| understand the arguments ;-)
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| That makes sense. Also (and I realise this is a bit less
| deep than undecidable grammar) I've certainly seen LaTeX
| documents with so many random macros that I don't recognise
| the content of it at all! I'm sure we've all come across
| those. I can understand why a program wouldn't stand much
| of a chance.
|
| Personally I never really needed LaTeX import so I don't
| really see it as a problem, but I know it matters to some
| people.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| On the "import from LaTeX" Joris van der Hoeven advanced
| the argument that the impossibility of writing a general
| import file from LaTeX allows LaTeX to maintain its
| status as the main document preparation system for
| scientific articles. In fact, if you could import
| arbitrary LaTeX, an user of a different system could
| collaborate with LaTeX users (probably a form of
| "conservative conversion" would be necessary for back and
| forth translation between document formats).
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| LaTeX imports and interprets arbitrary LaTeX, so other
| programs can theoretically do just as well. Importers
| running up against Halting Problems occur in many document
| formats, but this is not an issue in practice since most
| documents are not nefarious, and any importer can (and
| should) have sensible timeouts for parsing.
| mgubi wrote:
| No, document formats are not turing complete. HTML for
| example can be parsed without any problem. However take
| this TeX snippet "\foo [bar]" and tell me if "bar" is an
| argument of "foo" or not, without running the macro
| (which maybe you do not have. This is the basic problem
| any TeX conversion program encounters. TeX is not a
| document format but a programming language. The only
| thing you can do with a TeX program is to run it. On the
| other hand an HTML document can be parsed without knowing
| anything about its content.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| I once upgraded an EPS interpreter that was used as the
| key piece of an EPS importer. I added a couple of PS
| things like 'arcto'. It seems to me a LaTeX importer
| could work as an interpreter, too. Probably not very much
| fun after a while.
| dimatura wrote:
| Now that's a name I hadn't heard in a long time. It wasn't my cup
| of tea -- I prefer just writing latex directly, but it's a pity,
| as I'd rather see more people get into writing tex/latex, even if
| via GUI.
|
| I understand why it's not that mainstream outside certain
| academic fields, though, because it can be pretty annoying
| frustrating at times. But almost anything is better than word at
| writing long technical documents, specially in a collaborative
| way. (Went through that once for a grant proposal; very painful).
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I am so sorry to hear that.
|
| I wish that when companies such as this do go out of business
| that they should transition the licensing model to perpetual.
|
| It is gracious to keep running the licesnse server ut once it
| ends that is it.
|
| If the company is not going to lose any money because of it,
| which they will not since they are out fo the busness entirely,
| let the users have a chance to keep using it.
|
| (without support, without bugfixes, without upgrades to new
| platforms)
|
| Presumably this could lead to people sharing licensing detals and
| non paying customers may over time start using it, that should be
| an acceptable risk, given that there is no monetary gain nor
| loss.
|
| It would be awesome to have access to a rich library of dead
| software that people could use for free.
| DannyBee wrote:
| One issue you hit, and it sounds like they may be hitting here,
| is the need to pay yearly royalties or other yearly licensing
| fees for some of the components in their software.
|
| The company that they are paying fees to is unlikely to give
| them a a pass.
|
| In these cases, which are not uncommon, there is not a lot they
| can do.
|
| (Lots of companies have a mix of perpetual and non-perpetual
| users and pay royalties on the yearly folks and a one time
| fixed fee for the forever folks)
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Or the software, as written, NEEDS to contact a server to ask
| the question "am I legit" - and to remove this need would
| require modifying the software and redistributing it.
|
| Of course, if the companies funds run dry, they will stop
| renewing the url registration, and one of us can register it,
| throw up a server that says "you are legit!" To every request
| and the problem is solved.
| Someone wrote:
| That "one of us will register it" is unlikely to happen.
| It's easier to run a local server that handles the url or
| to hack the executable to ignore the check.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Exactly... and software today, more than ever, is built upon
| products from a gazillion different vendors.
| cosban wrote:
| This is sad, but I'm glad that they plan on making Scientific
| Word open source.
| coldacid wrote:
| Too bad it'll be an older version instead of the latest.
| danaos wrote:
| Our course instructor on "Estimation and Detection Theory" was a
| big fan of Scientific WorkPlace. It did such a great job at
| replacing the chalk-board during lockdown.
| imvetri wrote:
| Sorry to hear
| rietta wrote:
| Is the market for this software gone or is it that Mr. MacKichan
| is ready to retire and there wasn't a buyer for the company?
|
| I could imagine being tired and ready to close up shop after 40
| years as well.
| codebolt wrote:
| Wow, very sad to hear this. My high school ran a trial project
| back in 2000 and my class became the first in my country where
| every student received a laptop to use in all classes. We used
| Scientific Notebook for math. Being able to solve any equation
| and draw any graph with the click of a button was a huge boost in
| my ability to grasp trig, polynomials, logarithms, etc.
|
| I actually went from D-level math student pre-HS to graduating HS
| with an A+ and went on to get a degree in physics+math at uni. I
| honestly doubt if that would've been possible if not for SN.
| jnieminen wrote:
| What kind of alternatives there are for these? At least Matlab
| and Wolfram Mathematica come into my mind, but are there anything
| else?
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Maxima
| carlob wrote:
| The MuPad CAS that was used by this software has since been
| bought by Mathworks and integrated into the symbolic
| functionality of Matlab.
| tomrod wrote:
| Python's Sage, Jupyter, Octave
| [deleted]
| marcodiego wrote:
| Another example of abusive license:
|
| "If you need to install your software on a new or different
| computer, you will need to re-activate the software on that
| computer using that serial number. [..] This contacts the
| MacKichan Software licensing server, which we will keep running
| for at least two years."
|
| The hope:
|
| "We expect to make Scientific Word an open source product
| eventually. Since both Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific
| Notebook contain the proprietary computer algebra system MuPAD,
| they cannot be made open source. When the open source project for
| Scientific Word is established, an announcement will be made
| here."
| nerdponx wrote:
| Would be nice if they open sourced it now that the company
| doesn't exist anymore. But it seems to never pan out and people
| just lose access to the thing they paid for.
| [deleted]
| robbmorganf wrote:
| I never used this software, sadly. What made it different from
| Mathematica or from Maple?
| keid wrote:
| Way back when, just after the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s,
| a company named Triad Computing was formed by J. Mack Adams,
| Roger Hunter, and Barry MacKichan, with the goal of creating a
| WYSIWYG technical text editing system. I was their first
| employee. Roger, Barry, and I did all the programming. Venture
| capital for this sort of thing wasn't common then; we raised
| operating capital by contract work (e.g. I wrote a floating-point
| arithmetic library for the PDP-11). After about a year our
| product debuted, named T^3. Shortly after there was a company
| name dispute and we changed ours to TCI Software Research. I
| could go on at some length, but that's where MacKichan Software
| started.
| low_common wrote:
| What did J. Mack Adams do?
| keid wrote:
| As a founder/part-owner, like the other two he kicked in some
| money to get it started. Despite being a computer science
| professor he wasn't an effective real-world programmer so he
| in effect became a silent partner. He eventually got cold
| feet and his initial investment was bought out by the other
| two. (The other two ultimately went all-in and effectively
| gave up their professorships; J. Mack stayed in academia.)
| analog31 wrote:
| I wrote my physics dissertation using t3. For what it did at
| the time, it was fantastic.
| keid wrote:
| When I went to Oxford University in 1985 I learned that, at
| the time, theses in the mathematics department were
| _required_ to be written with T^3. I did not advertise my
| background--I did not want to be tech support. I actually
| went back to TCI for a while after finishing my degrees
| there.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Good to see that they at least plan to open source an old version
| before they shut down. This does happen sometimes, for example
| Synfig Animation Studio had this happen.
| iamgopal wrote:
| Yes but was it able to share selfie and video ?
| musingsole wrote:
| More importantly, was it collecting usage information and
| dumping it onto data markets?
| mukesh610 wrote:
| How is that relevant?
| musingsole wrote:
| Hahaha it was a joke you yokels
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| America: "Ethics is for chumps who want to finish last"
| pope_meat wrote:
| "hah, you did the right thing? Idiot, I made MONEY"
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive comments.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| Hmmm I've never heard about this software but I found some
| screenshots in google search, the UI looks a lot like another old
| CAS that I used in high school, "Derive" [1]. Derive was great
| :-)
|
| 1:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derive_(computer_algebra_syste...
| submeta wrote:
| ,,Derive" was an excellent piece of software. Loved it. Until I
| came across Mathematica years later.
| MelvinButtsESQ wrote:
| My best friend's dad's boss is named Barry MacGoughener. I wonder
| if they are from the same place in Scotland?
| zerop wrote:
| I feel terrible when I come across great products while they
| shutdown.. why I didn't know it?
| bachmeier wrote:
| In 2021 there's honestly not any good reason to know about
| Scientific Word. It was a good product 20 years ago, but it
| doesn't bring much to the table today that you'd have a reason
| to pay for.
| liketochill wrote:
| What is a replacement? I've been thinking about buying it as
| an easy way to write nice latex looking pdf files
| bachmeier wrote:
| LyX is very popular. TeXmacs is not exactly latex, but it
| does a good job. Things built on markdown like RStudio/R
| markdown. Many like Overleaf, though I haven't used it
| much. Even MS Word isn't terrible these days.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What was it good at 20 years ago? What is it missing now?
| bachmeier wrote:
| It made it easy to create latex documents without having to
| type latex code. It was especially handy for creating
| equations and tables. I don't know that it's missing
| anything today, it just doesn't provide a lot of value over
| something like LyX (that is open source and doesn't cost
| anything) or even a good markdown editor.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's a unique kind of business that commits to doing
| substantially more development work _after_ announcing they have
| ceased sales with no plan to restart.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| That's my plan. I doubt my business will be viable for many
| more years but I do feel a responsibility towards my existing
| customers.
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| That's a shame... science/math focused software is such a niche,
| and the people inside that niche(I imagine) _really_ appreciate
| that type of software.
|
| There could be some type of consulting opportunity here though
| for licensees that are still wanting to pay for that type of
| software. Depending on their use case, a consultant could try to
| shift what they currently are dependent on to a semi-customized
| collection of jupyter notebooks etc.
| [deleted]
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