Well heck, if you want to get into that just create a bones file on DL1 with a wand of wishing (3) and a blessed +5SDSM!!
still never won 
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in the other direction:
I used a vt320 at school-- it wasn’t that bad.
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No!!!
You need to switch to reStructuredText! Pandoc + RST is much more capable than Markdown.
(The atom editor also has good support via a Pandoc plugin, so if you ever need WYSIWY-mostly-G you can swap out VIM for a bit.)
Intriguing. How does it compare to (multi)markdown in support for such niceties as inlining LaTeX equations & citation management. Because if it does that well I may just switch.
And Atom is a fine, fine, fine editor. It’s also the slowest piece of software I’ve ever used. I’m not that old, but I imagine that this is probably very reminiscent of how Emacs used to be. (Emacs Makes a Computer Slow and all that… Atom: A Terrabyte Of Memory?! perhaps. 
)
Exactly the opposite, in fact. I think everyone can code and should. Not be software engineers, naturally, why would they, but learn to use the computer to the level where they can automate day-to-day tasks.
Time, I’ll grant you. You can learn on your own just fine. It’s faster with help, but loads of people learned how to code under their own steam just fine.
Inclination? Well, I’ve not advocated herding people into code camps. If you don’t want to, you don’t want to. But you aren’t fully using your computer unless you know how. Them’s the breaks.
I mean, heavens, we ask absolutely everyone to learn some mathematics growing up, don’t we? That doesn’t mean everyone need be a mathematician. But a level of math-literacy is required. So it is with coding.
Wow. You have a really dim view of the general population.
I suggest that asking people to learn how to program is like asking them to write competently or to know how to drive or any number of other skills we expect everyone to have. It’s not that hard.
Where did you find the contempt? The conversation was about how people making devices are treating their users with insufficient respect by not letting them at the damned computer part of the computer. The users are the injured party.
Yes, and they’ve done all that without most people knowing how to unlock the true power of the devices they have. Imagine how better things would be if this power was more democratically distributed with everyone capable of exercising far more control over their devices instead of being artificially hamstrung by software made with ill intent.
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So, @jlw… How expensive was this Freewrite?
I am going to say it was around $300 when I kickstarted it. Also known as: EONS before they delivered it 2 years or so late.
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So, Freewriter isn’t. 
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This is dangerously analogous to saying everyone who drive a car should know how it operates and be able to repair it themselves. To use your own words,“It’s not that hard.”
Computers are quite useful even if you have no clue how to code, just as cars are useful even if you only know how to add gasoline (but you really should check the oil level, wiper fluid, and tire pressures regularly even if you have sensors for those).
It was called the Hemmingwriter when it first hit the market. I almost wanted to bail just over the name change.
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Politely disagree. Programming is akin to driving a car, not repairing it. Good high level languages do not require deep understanding of the internals of the machine, and being able to explain what you want the computer to do is the more powerful way to use them. It may be the difference between tooling down the slow lane and road racing, but it’s still driving.
On the flip side, learning to maintain your own car and computer is not that hard. I know plenty of amateurs who do both.
Sincerely,
An SRE & shadetree mechanic.
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There is another one, https://www.theregister.co.uk
Not as such, but it sure would be a huge step forward if people were at least aware of the fact that they are not using magic boxes but a man-made technological device, with all the flaws that this implies. If anything, it would put some pressure on the manufactures of hard- and software to come up with something better. No other industry gets away with releasing this much crap into the wild.
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Basically what @anon39846808 said. Coding is a general skill that anyone can pick up with not a lot of effort. Will you be able to create serious software? Of course not. That’d be like diagnosing deep faults or designing your own fuel injector. But there’s a ton of things you can learn to script with very little effort.
And, were the software manufacturers on our side, they’d build powerful and friendly scriptability into all their software and you could learn to code all the easier.
To give you an example, say you have a piece of software that converts file format A to file format B. You need to convert 4000 files of A-type to B-type. The software does not have a bulk-convert mode.
I suggest that
a) everyone should know how to handle this situation without clicking some nine thousand times.
b) software should be built to make a) as easy as possible (but no easier )
We currently use devices which make a) either unreasonably difficult or just short of impossible. This is obscene. Computers are superb at things like “do this four thousand times, please” and to not have the facility to make use of this is incomprehensible.
And yet I don’t know how to arrange such optimization on a mobile platform[1] without the application in question having it specially implemented or without writing my own app which, before you ask, is a bridge too far. Not everyone ought to know how to write apps, though getting yourself to the amateur level where you can is, again, easier than you think. The hard stuff in coding is actually quite a ways ahead and is largely either hardcore algorithm-fu stuff or simply knowing how to effectively engineer something with a great many moving pieces. That’s professional stuff and requires a certain affinity not so much in order to be capable of it, as to be able to work with it and not be driven insane.
[1] It is possible there is some way I’m ignorant of, but even if that’s the case, it represents evidence that the design of the device isn’t really being forthcoming with it.
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Then spend some dollars and buy one that does. I am also a developer. I do script a lot, I do it for fun. I’ve been doing it for 35 years. And yet, when I get confronted with tasks that I very likely need todo only once or every couple of months, I look for software to buy.
Because coding something I am not that interested in takes away time from other things. Including coding. Even though I already know a heap of coding tools and methods and patterns.
I think the everybody can code camp severely underestimates how much they’ve already learned. And what the users’ motivations are.
I don’t think that the user wants to convert 1.000 images. They want to have 1.000 images. That’s different.
RST actually has good support, in that it’s an extendable language and there are :math: roles defined.
As am example, my personal website uses Pelican, and becuase I’m kind of a math person, it has a lot of equations in it, rendered via MathJax (I’d include a link to the site, but that would compromize my super-secret identity!). As another example, the Sphinx document generator also supports LaTeX markup, and will produce output in MathJax, or it can render it to a PNG with dvipng or dvisvgm.
(Here’s a random web page (from the SciPy project) giving an example of a equation-heavy page being rendered from RST in Sphinx.)
So the answer is that it supports it as a language, but an important question is how well whatever software you’re using supports it (for example, does pandoc do a good job?). My guess that that with the appropriate magical incantation (ie, the appropriate arcane command line arguments) it would work, at least as well as Markdown.
(These comments also apply to citations. RST supports it, but you’d have to see how well your document transcoder supports it.)
Most intriguing. I’ll play with it a bit and see what happens.
I do teach people to code. I have some experience in the matter. It can be done with the right tools.
I maintain that were scripting tools available better made and more friendly, everyone would be able to acquire the necessary skills without expending too much effort.
And sure, sometimes you can buy the software. But sometimes software to fit your needs doesn’t exist, and sometimes it doesn’t work, quite, like you need it to. Maybe you’ve better luck with your tools than I do, because I am forever writing little scripts to make something work like I need it to.
