Jakob Voss wrote:
> a) BibTeX

Can I vote against BibTex, please?

At the core of BibTeX is a language called 'BST' or that's the file 
extension used, which is as close as it comes to a name.

This is an entirely undocumented language written to work on a patchily 
documented format. It's stack-based (not unlike PostScript), with 
special operation(s) to manipulate names based on deep assumptions about 
names and the ways they are formatted. These assumptions, by and large, 
hold for the personal names of North American English speakers (but I 
seem to recall is unable to correctly format the name of the President 
of the USA due to his title). The further you move from names of North 
American English speakers, the more they break (non-ASCII characters, 
eastern order names, complex titles, non-"standard" capitalisation, etc, 
etc, etc).

BST is non-recursive, attempting to execute recursive functions gives 
the error "Curse on you, wizard, before you recurse on me." Yes, the BST 
interpreter does refer to users as "wizards," which seems less cool 
after the first 12 hours of debugging.

Users have adapted to BibTeX by using an experimental 
approach---tinkering with the BibTeX entries until they 'look right,' 
which in most cases involves cramming everything into what BibTeX thinks 
  of as the surname, because BibTex never omits or initialises the surname.

If we're going to use a bibliographic framework, please, please, please 
don't make it BibTeX.

cheers
stuart
-- 
Stuart Yeates
http://www.nzetc.org/       New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/     Institutional Repository