Re: Difficulty of using Org mode

[Michael Hannon <jm_hannon@yahoo.com>]

Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> wrote:

>Michael Hannon <jm_hannon@yahoo.com> writes:
>
>> Hi, folks.  Just FYI:
>>
>> ----- Forwarded Message -----
>>>From: Yihui Xie <xie@yihui.name>
>>>To: Stephen Eglen <S.J.Eglen@damtp.cam.ac.uk>
>>>Cc: ESS-help@r-project.org
>>>Sent: Saturday, June 2, 2012 3:08 PM
>>>Subject: Re: [ESS] knitr
>>>
>>>There is no point comparing markdown with org mode, and the answer
>>>will be definitely this: org mode can beat markdown almost everywhere;
>>>they are not even comparable. The point is that markdown was not
>>>designed to provide new features; it was designed to be simple so it
>>>intentionally discarded lots of features and people can learn it
>>>quickly. I have tried a few times to learn org mode, and it is just
>>>too complicated for me.
>
> Well, it all boils down to disambiguate what "learning Org" means.
>

> It is hard to say just from the message above.  If you can, please redirect
> the OP to this list so that he feels guided in tasks he wants to do with
> Org.

Hi, Bastien.  I don't know this guy, but I don't think he's *trying* to learn
Org mode at this point.  He seems to be a very capable guy:

    http://yihui.name/

and is evidently the author of the R package "knitr" for literate programming.

I was just struck by the fact that a person of his evident ability would give
up on Org mode.  I can't say it has been all that easy for me to use Org mode,
and I'm sure there are Avogadro's number of things I still don't know about
it, but I've never viewed it is being *that* difficult.  Probably I've been
spoiled by all the help I've gotten from this enormously useful list.

There's no real action item for anybody here.  I speculate that this guy might
just have had more fun writing his own package than in learning somebody
else's.  But I don't see how it could hurt for the Org-mode community to keep
an eye out for usability issues.

-- Mike