Jarmo Hurri <jarmo.hu...@iki.fi> writes: >> 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.
Then, it would help to have more practical examples compared to what we have in https://www.orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-asymptote.html >> 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? That a common minimalist argument. Some people dislike the fact that software includes features they do not personally use. Similar arguments are often raised regarding, for example, games shipped with Emacs. I disagree in this particular case. Having ob-asymptote.el is not a featurism - I would not expect people to play around a full new programming language just because ob-language.el is in Org. The barrier of entry is too high to make it destructing. Another question is long-term maintainability. We have a limited manpower and cannot cater too many support requests or take care about parts of code not used by most people. After removing org-contrib over a year ago, your email is the first issue raised regarding ob-asymptote removal. Since you are volunteering to maintain it, things gets easier. However, the final decision is after Bastien. >> 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? Apparently asymptote is not commonly used (at least, not in my research field). We do provide built-in support for Gnuplot, LaTeX TikZ, and Python (Matplotlib), PlantUML. AFAIK, they are much more common. Best, Ihor
