Hello alls,
"Grigoriy A. Sitkarev" <sitka...@komitex.ru> wrote: > While there is one exceptional sociological and > psychological phenomena with groff/troff (as a part of Unix > culture), which is still a point to study. The groff mail‐ > ing list joins three generations of very interesting people: > ‘‘grandfathers’’, ‘‘fathers’’ and ‘‘sons’’. As an 80’s born > kid, I consider myself to be a ‘‘grandchild’’ of people like > Douglas McIlroy, in hope that they will accept us, the > youth, with this role. Moreover, these people come with > different background and they were involved in different > areas of the arts — literature, music, languages, program‐ > ming, mathematics and other. > > There must be something we do not completely understand and > value yet. And these aspects or what are not technical at > all. > > I hope to dig to the roots of this phenomena one day. You maybe know this article of Thomas Scoville: _The elements of style: Unix as litterature_, (http://theody.net/elements.html). This article might be a good starting point to understand who are the troffers and why they like troff. I believe that people who write texts feel at home with text interfaces. Not because they are more productive (how can we really mesure that?), but because a language interface is the natural way to manipulate texts. I think that troff is the way that the Unix philosophy of language as interface has meet text processing. This is well explained in the introduction of _Unix Text Processing_, which relates this strange moment of our recent history: tools made to develop software can be used to write texts, because they have been made to manipulate the language using the language itself. Cheers, Pierre-Jean.
