[pracjourn-forum] A weird error (and broader issues)

[Peter Flynn]

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 13:35, Peter Flom wrote:
> I think this actually goes to a larger point, which I made in my recent
> article, and plan to stress in my talk.....that debugging is an
> essential part of the process, and that teaching people  a) that
> debugging is normal and b) how to do it   are essential parts of
> teaching people to use LaTeX. 

In this case, it's not strictly speaking debugging, just the unfortunate
use of a PostScript package with PDF, which doesn't understand
PostScript...which is also a documentation problem.

> Coming (as I do) from a background completely removed from programming,
> this is not 'natural' to me, and this has both psychological and
> practical ramifications in broadening the use of LaTeX

This is very valuable. I like to think of it in a similar way to what 
happened to me when I strayed into the processing of drug use surveys 
many moons ago...I understood the idea behind it, but it took me a long 
time to fathom why I was getting percentages like 65535E+72 until 
someone explained that dividing a cell by a zero number of users was not
productive :-) and I never did grok the difference between cluster 
analysis and factorial analysis...and yet everyone around me was going
"O, just do this...and this...and pick a value..and it just works!"

///Peter