Re: Volunteering to maintain ob-asymptote.el within Org

[Jarmo Hurri]

Greetings Munyoki.

Munyoki Kilyungi <me@bonfacemunyoki.com> writes:

> Hi Jarmo!
>
> Jarmo Hurri <jarmo.hurri@iki.fi> anaandika:
>
>> I hereby volunteer to maintain ob-asymptote.el.
>
> Nice!
>
>> This file has been moved
>> to org-contrib, but I would like it to be brought back into Org itself.
>>
>> I strongly feel that Asymptote is way too valuable as a scientific tool
>> to be dropped out of Org.

> Isn't this debatable?  

Yes, that is a good reason to be involved in these discussions.

> TBH, this is the first time I'm hearing about it.  I've looked it up,
> and indeed it seems to be useful.  

For some reason, even people who would certainly benefit from Asymptote
often have not heard of it. The developers do not really
advertise. Asymptote is amazingly powerful and sophisticated.

> That said, shouldn't this be in org-contrib?  Too many features in a
> tool - featurism - may be distracting, in the sense that you focus
> more on your tool than work at hand.  

I do not understand this. Why would supporting a professional-level
graphics programming language be distracting someone from their work
when using Org?

> And that said, to work around this, I reckon that's why (?)  we have
> org-contrib.  You - the end user - install what you want/need. 

Yes, but whenever we split up support, we raise the threshold for the
use of a combination of tools, in this case Org and Asymptote.

Org is a very powerful publication tool. Does it not make complete sense
to include support for a tool for creating professional-quality
publication graphics?

All the best,

Jarmo