Stalled inovation
#################

:date: 2006-08-10T17:34:00
:category: computer
:tags: linux, OpenOffice

I am still thinking about scripts­how incredibly useful they are and how
surprisingly little of them are in GUI-Linux world. Given the fact, that
every Linux user (not talking about programmers) knows very well how
scripting capabilities could be useful for everybody (not only for
programmers), I would expect that every Linux application would be
script-enabled sooner than application from any other environment. It is
not so. From major applications, there is a long list of those which do
not have scripting or the one they have is inferior. Even OpenOffice.org
(which is probably the most advanced in this area) has scripts which are
such mess, that even thousand-times cursed VBA is just a dream against
it—talking to a scripting user about
``com.sun.star.style.CharacterProperties`` (and that is one of the
shorter names) is just not good. And I am not even talking about most
KDE applications (which I otherwise prefer)—they have either nothing_
or something terribly unusable (kate_ is going to get some reasonable
scripting only in upcoming 3.5 version). And that’s even worse given the
fact that underlying KDE technology has so excellent `inter-application
scripting technology`_.

Now, another sad story from the world of Linux. I was reading Tim Bray’s
`blog about expiration`_ of his `RDF challenge`_. I have tried to get
bigger picture of what he is talking about, so I read also `his
introduction to RDF`_ and I was struck as with a lighting—he is talking
about my beloved pet, bibliography and sucking BibTeX! You see, I am
becoming to be a social scientist and I used to be a lawyer. And in
academic writing in both of these professions there is huge amount of
references which needs to be quoted. So, for example my wife (who is a
linguist—other heavily referencing area of science) switched immediately
from Word after her first simple article written in `LyX`_ —convenience
of having all bibliography material in one file is just so big, that the
switch was just not question. So, it is obvious that having separate
bibliography database and the referring document as such is The Right
Thing™. However, then we get to the blue part of the story—almost only
usable bibliography manager in the world of Linux (and in the Free
software world itself) is [BibTeX].

http://hamish.blogs.com/mishmash/2004/01/bibliographic_r.html

.. _nothing:
    http://koffice.kde.org
.. _kate:
    http://kate.kde.org
.. _`inter-application scripting technology`:
    http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/3.5-api/kdelibs-apidocs/dcop/html/index.html
.. _`blog about expiration`:
    https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/10/24/RDF.net
.. _`RDF challenge`:
    https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21/RDFNet
.. _`his introduction to RDF`:
    http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/24/rdf.html
.. _LyX:
    http://www.lyx.org