"Some scientists use TeX or LatEX but for most people Word is the thing that writers use these days"
About this Quote
There’s a casual authority baked into this line: a scientist gesturing at the tools of knowledge-work and quietly redrawing the boundary between “serious” technical writing and the messy, social reality of how most writing actually gets done. De Icaza frames TeX/LaTeX as a niche practice (“some scientists”), then drops the real punch: “for most people Word is the thing.” The phrasing is bluntly normative, almost weary. It’s not a celebration of Word’s elegance; it’s an acknowledgment of Word’s cultural dominance as infrastructure.
The intent reads pragmatic, even strategic. De Icaza has long operated at the junction of engineering and adoption: building platforms only matters if people use them. So the subtext is about power, not typography. Word isn’t just software; it’s a standard, a hiring expectation, a compatibility regime. “The thing that writers use” collapses poets, journalists, students, bureaucrats into one broad class, hinting that the center of gravity in writing isn’t the academy’s ideal workflow but the workplace’s default.
Contextually, it lands as a corrective to a certain techie romanticism: the belief that better tools win on merit. In reality, network effects win. LaTeX may produce cleaner equations and more reproducible papers, but Word owns the everyday pipeline of drafts, comments, track changes, institutional templates, and administrative gatekeeping. The line works because it refuses the fantasy that writing culture is chosen; it’s inherited, standardized, and enforced by whoever controls the documents.
The intent reads pragmatic, even strategic. De Icaza has long operated at the junction of engineering and adoption: building platforms only matters if people use them. So the subtext is about power, not typography. Word isn’t just software; it’s a standard, a hiring expectation, a compatibility regime. “The thing that writers use” collapses poets, journalists, students, bureaucrats into one broad class, hinting that the center of gravity in writing isn’t the academy’s ideal workflow but the workplace’s default.
Contextually, it lands as a corrective to a certain techie romanticism: the belief that better tools win on merit. In reality, network effects win. LaTeX may produce cleaner equations and more reproducible papers, but Word owns the everyday pipeline of drafts, comments, track changes, institutional templates, and administrative gatekeeping. The line works because it refuses the fantasy that writing culture is chosen; it’s inherited, standardized, and enforced by whoever controls the documents.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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