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Comment by pmeira | Hacker News Reader

> Most people in Julia's target audience know latex already

Is Julia's target audience really that small? Either that or you'd be surprised how many people don't use LaTeX but do write scientific code and papers.

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Even if you don't use Latex, all the equation editors in e.g. word etc use more or less the same latex symbol names Julia does (I remember typing things in by name in MS-Word 2007 long before I started latex). Even if they don't use more latex than that.

And if the people don't use enough symbols in their papers to memorise the type-able names, they probably don't want to use them in their code in the first place.

I don't know Latex and find it difficult to learn, but have found that it's almost trivial to remember the Latex names for these symbols, especially since it's often a small subset of these that you use, depending on your field. They've been pretty quick to get into my muscle memory.

Just like with natural languages unrelated to yours, it's the grammar that really does your head in, needing just the vocabulary is Easy mode.

What else do people use to write scientific papers? A word processor?

There exist journals who accept only Word documents (and then translate it to LaTeX after the editor accepts the paper).

All of my university colleagues (physics dept) knew how to use latex.

Or they have a secretary that does ;)

For physics, I think that's true. For other fields in general, it probably varies a lot (I'd love to see some numbers). We live in bubbles but we should try to remember that our bubbles don't represent the whole world.

Writing in the non-Julia world, my standard keyboard input is set to Unicode character interpretation so I can enter math symbols (mostly predicate logic and Z notation). I can believe it. Just enough to translate the algorithm of interest is enough for it to make sense.

IMO the people whose scientific papers are equation-heavy will have someone else do the editing, or the publisher will have a template. Latex could use a disruption, but who will do it...?

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