Re: [Groff] Macro Packages

[Pierre-Jean]

Hello alls,


"Grigoriy A. Sitkarev" <address@hidden> 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.