I also know people usually misunderstand me because I am a “programmer” and all I see is “code”. I guess that’s fair enough, but I fully understand legal being of a completely different nature from Rust.

What I also understand is that no matter how long everyone argues about it, the only thing that matters about legal is the text. The font, the styling, etc is all secondary. It might be important, but it’ll never be primary. Unless courts start judging differently based on page margins I guess.

The same goes for science. Publishing “attention is all you need” in an 8bit NES font might not be fashionable, but it does not and cannot detract from the discovery within it. LaTex produces the exact same documents (I know it is configurable but we are going for a certain style) and that’s what this is about. Not how the tools work but that we fundamentally even care about it instead of focusing on the primary issues like correctness, openness, accessibility. I’d like academic papers to be APIs actually.

Again I see the importance of styling and appearance in general. It’s just that we start with that and I think that’s problematic and actively harms our progress.

Also, to conclude, I am nitwit. This is just my take.

Edit: A man can dream, right? If a paper was plaintext I could typeset it last minute in 8bit NES fonts if I’d be so inclined. I hate ya’ll deciding how everything looks and works. I know that’s technically challenging, but to me that’s where the progress is. An academic paper like, say, a jupyter notebook would be awesome, not? Would you give up your fancy type setting? I would!