[Nitramp]

Science doesn't abstractly drop from the heavens, fully formed. Every science has practical enablers that are required to get stuff done. Astronomers use telescopes, physicists/chemists/etc use lab equipment, Mathematicians use various notations and other tricks (and nowadays proof assistants) to make their job easier.

MS Office might not be practical for computer science (also note how the OP doesn't list that), but learning how to write your papers in latex might, and knowing how to use a shell certainly is.

E.g. if you'd like students to learn about type theory, they will need to experiment with your compiler. You cannot expect students to miraculously be proficient in this, and explicitly teaching them (and requiring it as a prerequisite course to signal that yes, it's important) can turn weeks of frustration followed by a huge dropout rate into a productive course.

[swiley]

They should be writing them in asciidoc (or even markdown) and using style sheets if they really need complex formatting!!! (although at least latex is decent at typesetting and has nice defaults.)

[whatshisface]

Does asciidoc have equation typesetting support? I don't really care what I use to write my words, everything is equally good (except for LaTeX which is abnormally good at typesetting), but I care a lot about the user experience for equations, which varies widely between programs.

[swiley]

I always use LaTeX style equations although I think it supports MathML if you want a WYSIWYG. The LaTeX math is the main argument for it, mathtype is kind of miserable.

The reasons I prefer asciidoc to straight LaTeX are:

1) the formatting is completely seperated from the text

2) you’re insulated from the specific rendering engine (you can use PDFLaTeX or WebKit+MathJax etc.) while still getting decent equation syntax and BibTeX.

[Nitramp]

Yes. I intended that more as an abstract example for a tool that's useful to do science, but clearly not a science in of itself[1].

Though latex might still come in handy once you actually want to submit papers to journals, or for a thesis. YMMV.

[1] then again, if I remember my feeble attempts to write latex macros, maybe the emergent behaviour of common latex packages would be a good research subject? ;-)