Message-Id: <9210071539.AA08754@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Date:         Wed, 7 Oct 92 11:11:12 EDT
From: Michael Barr <barr@TRIPLES.MATH.MCGILL.CA>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
To: Multiple recipients of <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Subject:      article.sty
Status: R


I can hardly believe that there are people out there who say that
latex should not have letter.sty, for whatever reason given (and I
heartily agree with Leslie Lamport about having to learn Word????
just to do letters, when I use TeX for everything else---including
my very own baseball scorecard).  How does having it damage people
who don't want it?  Is it the couple K of disk space?  Then delete
it.  Does it offend you that I have saved the space in my brain by
not having learned another system?  I cannot understand what is
motivating this discussion.

I am having a similar discussion within the category theory
community over what the commutative diagram package should look
like.  One person said he wanted X (it is unimportant, but X is
2-cells).  Another wrote to complain that this was a mistake, that
in five years he would want another gadget, that no software package
had ever gotten better by adding features, etc.  I think you have to
distinguish the negative effects of featuritis at the core of a
language and that of the extensions.  The features we are now
discussing (the entire latex 3 project) is about macro packages, not
the TeX language itself and some of the people discussing it seem to
have forgotten that point.  If there are people who use X, then of
course, it ought to be included.  If in five years they have stopped
using X and are now using Y or Z, then those will have to be added.
Knuth somewhere described (I think it was in his '79 paper in the
AMS Bull) the cheer that went up when he told a group of
mathematicians that in TeX you could once more use root signs
instead of fractional exponents.  The question is what is to be
servant and what is master.  We changed our writing style to
accommodate the problems typesetters had with math and now, using
TeX, we can change it back.

Michael Barr