LaTeX is code...

I'm giving a talk on LaTeX this Monday as part of our new grad student "boot camp" series. It's really more of an interactive presentation: I'll use writelatex (or sharelatex) to demo examples, give student simple assignments, and use real-time chat to see how things are going. It should be quite interesting. 

Here's the talk announcement:

Did you know that every time you use $..$ to italicize text, or use \\ to force a newline, Leslie Lamport cries out in agony and Don Knuth starts another fascicle of Volume IV of TAoCP ?  

Come and learn about how to use LaTeX, and use it well. Your collaborators will love you, your advisors will love me, and you'll realize that the most awfully written drivel looks awesome when typeset well.  

This will be interactive!! I'll be using a shared space for editing and viewing latex documents, and there will be class activities, so please do bring your laptops/tablets/other editing device so you can follow along and participate. 

For this talk I solicited comments from colleagues as to what they'd like their students to learn. Probably the most useful comment I got was from +Robert Ricci and +Eric Eide: to whit,

LaTeX is code.

This might seem obvious, but once you internalize it, all kinds of other things become very natural. For example

• You should really use some kind of IDE to write and build your documents
• Version control is your friend
• *sections should be separate files. 
• Text should be readable. 
• Use macros where convenient
• Don't reinvent: use the many many built-in packages at ctan.org
• Use tex.stackexchange.com to learn how to hack whatever you need in LaTeX. 

A corollary: to see a theoretician editing LaTeX close to a STOC/FOCS/SODA deadline is to realize that theory folk are AWESOME programmers.