One question I would like to bring up - since almost
none of us are familiar with the current maxima code
base, and few of us are qualified in Lisp, is there
any way we could "translate" maxima into another, more
widely used language?
If this wouldn't be worthwhile then please forget I
mentioned it, but here are the points I've been
rolling around in my head which made me want to at
least pose the question:
1) C/C++ are in my experience widely taught and used
by schools, researchers, and other open source people,
while Lisp programming is a relatively rare skill.
Since any open source project needs as many good
coders as possible, the odds are we would attract more
help if our language were a little more commonly used.
2) We might be able to convince people who are writing
routines for academic research projects or other high
end applications to write libraries which could be
added to maxima. Since as far as I know (those who
know better feel free to correct me) most such
projects don't code in Lisp nowadays, the odds of our
being able to make use of those efforts is relatively
small, barring some ability of Lisp to interface with
other languages.
There are some obvious downsides as well, such as
moving from a working code base to basically creating
a new one and the potential difficulty of moving
concepts from Lisp to another language, but I thought
I would at least put the idea out there.
CY
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