[SanderNL]

My point is not that. Sure, you can go from Word to OpenOffice. Great, now you manually highlight your code in that..

It’s a deeper thing. You can hack Word and related tools for coding and eventually it is acceptable I guess, but it’s starting from the wrong foundation.

This ladder will never reach the moon.

Word’s diffs are not “just different”. they are objectively inferior in many ways. I personally witness daily the travesty of government staff’s handling of information.

Word is a fancy digital typewriter and IMO it’s the wrong abstraction for this day and age and cultural issues are the only thing keeping us back. As always.

Edit: academic papers looking like they were written on a 19th century typewriter.. I don’t get this fascination with style, from scientists of all people. Lay down the info, provide the data. Kerning your fonts properly.. oh my god, I need to cool down. I am a hot headed type of guy, sorry about that.

[Propelloni]

Hey, thanks for the reply. From what I read, I think you think that language use is some kind of coding with words where you have a deterministic relation between input and output. You seem to treat the semantic content of a statement as if it is somehow static, objective, and oberservable. I don't think it is and I'm in good company on that matter.

That being said, that's just my reading of your comment and I could be wrong, which is kind of my argument here. If I'm right lawyers don't care about your notion, they use language for something different than mere information encoding. Therefore they need tools that support their use case. MS Word (or word processors in general) might not be the best tool for that job, but it is good enough. Integrating a well trained ChatGPT into MS Word will help lawyers much more than any structured entry form ever could.

BTW, the LaTeX quip was intended to make light of the idea of separating content and style, which goes way back. Consider TeX' age. Your reaction tells me, you think LaTeX is a styling tool, which in a sense it is, and that's what it is about, which it is not. Hordes of scientists (and type-setting professionals) argue in favor of LaTeX (or other type-setting systems) because you just write the content in plain text. LaTeX takes care of the style. TeX files are also just markup and easily git'able. It does make life easier, but it is not as important as some people make it out to be.

[SanderNL]

Thanks for indulging me. I know I am yelling at the clouds.

I also know people usually misunderstand me because I am a “programmer” and all I see is “code”. I guess that’s fair enough, but I fully understand legal being of a completely different nature from Rust.

What I also understand is that no matter how long everyone argues about it, the only thing that matters about legal is the text. The font, the styling, etc is all secondary. It might be important, but it’ll never be primary. Unless courts start judging differently based on page margins I guess.

The same goes for science. Publishing “attention is all you need” in an 8bit NES font might not be fashionable, but it does not and cannot detract from the discovery within it. LaTex produces the exact same documents (I know it is configurable but we are going for a certain style) and that’s what this is about. Not how the tools work but that we fundamentally even care about it instead of focusing on the primary issues like correctness, openness, accessibility. I’d like academic papers to be APIs actually.

Again I see the importance of styling and appearance in general. It’s just that we start with that and I think that’s problematic and actively harms our progress.

Also, to conclude, I am nitwit. This is just my take.

Edit: A man can dream, right? If a paper was plaintext I could typeset it last minute in 8bit NES fonts if I’d be so inclined. I hate ya’ll deciding how everything looks and works. I know that’s technically challenging, but to me that’s where the progress is. An academic paper like, say, a jupyter notebook would be awesome, not? Would you give up your fancy type setting? I would!

[Propelloni]

If you are a nitwit, I'm one, too. Don't worry. I think I get your take. You say the important part of legal and scientific texts is their content, not their form. And I agree. But that is not where we started. We started with (paraphrasing) "programmer tools like git are superior to MS Word, therefore lawyers should use git." There, I disagree.

[SanderNL]

Oh, right. I agree as well. Git is not their kind of tool.