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From: eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout)
Subject: A portrait of the TeX novice/user/hacker/...
Message-ID: <1991Apr28.235931.15846@csrd.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@csrd.uiuc.edu (news)
Organization: Univ of Illinois, Center for Supercomputing R&D, Urbana, IL
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 91 23:59:31 GMT
Lines: 23

After the well-known classification of the Unix user/wizard/...
maybe it is time to start compiling the profile of the
users of TeX. Kindly consider this an opportunity to
caricature all those levels you left behind you:

novice: still writes $a_{1}$ because Leslie Lamport says so;
user: thinks to have found a bug in TeX

or to which you aspire:

hacker: writes self-modifying macros
wizard: knows how to recompile TeX with a larger pool size
guru: has actually found a bug in TeX

Mail to me, or post in reply to this message (I think
the latter is more fun).

If the response turns out well I'll compile the results
for a piece in TUGboat, with due credit to the
contributors, of course.

Victor.