Old people and technology man. My advisor during my masters was an absolutely brilliant woman; she’s one of the people who has been basically defining the field of data science since the early 90s. The first time I ever published with her, I sent my first draft and her response was “can you convert this to docx? I don’t know how to work with tex.” I still think she’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known but damn did it hurt to work on Microsoft word documents with her
That might be the stupidest thought terminating cliché ive ever heard. The virtue of the tool absolutely does matter. I’m not out here trying to metaphorically mine iron with a pickaxe when we have metaphorical excavators available, and no amount of expertise will allow somebody to be more efficient with the pickaxe than any random novice with an excavator.
Unironically – use markdown. It’s far more intuitive for most people, comes with similar git tracking benefits, and has simpler compilation / tooling steps.
For tex, i would suggest taking a basic template, and writing what you need, looking up how to do things as you need them. Theres a bunch of documentation on sites like overleaf, and you can learn a lot by looking at stackexchange threads.
YouTube. Straight up. When I learned to code my yt search history was a million different versions of “how to <do thing> in python” for months. I also really liked the “Computational methods for physics” textbook (you can find the pdf for free on cambridge website), but that book is written for an audience that knows near graduate math but starts praying if their advisor asks them to write a program
Old people and technology man. My advisor during my masters was an absolutely brilliant woman; she’s one of the people who has been basically defining the field of data science since the early 90s. The first time I ever published with her, I sent my first draft and her response was “can you convert this to docx? I don’t know how to work with tex.” I still think she’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known but damn did it hurt to work on Microsoft word documents with her
It’s the tool that she’s learned to get the job done, the virtue of the tool does not matter to a master crafts
manperson, only their proficiency.That might be the stupidest thought terminating cliché ive ever heard. The virtue of the tool absolutely does matter. I’m not out here trying to metaphorically mine iron with a pickaxe when we have metaphorical excavators available, and no amount of expertise will allow somebody to be more efficient with the pickaxe than any random novice with an excavator.
Absolutely true - and that’s when ‘masters’ become obsolete.
Have you got recommendations for learning how to use tex, R, or Python for those that haven’t learnt how to programme?
Unironically – use markdown. It’s far more intuitive for most people, comes with similar git tracking benefits, and has simpler compilation / tooling steps.
For tex, i would suggest taking a basic template, and writing what you need, looking up how to do things as you need them. Theres a bunch of documentation on sites like overleaf, and you can learn a lot by looking at stackexchange threads.
YouTube. Straight up. When I learned to code my yt search history was a million different versions of “how to <do thing> in python” for months. I also really liked the “Computational methods for physics” textbook (you can find the pdf for free on cambridge website), but that book is written for an audience that knows near graduate math but starts praying if their advisor asks them to write a program