[TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

Adam Thornton athornton at gmail.com
Tue Jan 11 13:22:49 AEST 2022


Taking this to COFF...

> On Jan 10, 2022, at 7:13 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) <lyndon at orthanc.ca> wrote:
> 
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey writes:
> 
>> As long as man pages are formatted with ?roff, I don't see it going
>> away.  I don't suppose many people use troff any more, but there are
>> enough of us, and as long as man pages stay the way they are, I don't
>> think we're in any danger.
> 
> Well there is mandoc(1).  But as time goes by they just seem to be
> re-implementing nroff.  Of course that *must* be easier than just
> learning n/troff in the first place :-P

As someone who did a lot of a Ph.D. in the history of computing, and then went into IT because he liked eating protein sometimes:

The great secret is that NO ONE EVER READS THE LITERATURE.

We have now made all the mistakes at least four times:

Once for each of mainframes, minis, micros, and mobile.

You can be a rock star at any development or operations job, even if you are, like me, a Bear Of Little Brain, simply by having some idea of what was tried already to solve a problem like this, and why it didn't work.

Which you can get by actually stopping to read up about your problem before diving headfirst into coding up a solution for it.

If you happen to get stinking rich from this advice, you can buy me a bottle of whiskey sometime.

Adam


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