I am sending in a couple of question relative to the simple user of
Maxima.
First of all I have no knowledge at all of Lisp and for the moment I
have no possibilities to learn this language, although I know of its
capabilities.
Martin posed some interesting comments and I will reply them below.
I am still in the list because I understand that we need to create a
group of users which are between the developers and the common
users. These top users are the responsible to "spread the news of
Maxima" to the rest of the community. I am trying to be in this group
before recommending the generalised use of Maxima among my students.
The organization of the topics could be a good start, but I feel that
other topics are more urgent to the non-developers group.
First, the first question a first user does is: can it simplify my
huge (or not so huge) expressions? I know that the answer is not so
easy and we must know what is "simple" for us.
However, how to deal with this problems is being really tricky to
me. I could not find a paper or so, which could give some light to
this problem. I still have problems with trigonometric simplifications
generated by matrices multiplications ... While these and similar
problems have not enough documentation or hints or examples I cannot
recommend Maxima to users which will have greater problems than mine.
Other question is that installing newer versions is better when we
have an available binary such as .deb and .rpm for Linux and the same
for Windows. This turn easier we, from the list, to test newer
versions and submit bugs. I know that we can get the cvs but this is
an extra barrier to the installation of a newer (ans unstable)
version.
>>>>> "Martin" == a9104910 <a9104910@unet.univie.ac.at> writes:
Martin> access to lisp -- what a wonderful language for doing
Martin> maths! -- underneath, mathematica, maple don't have this!
This is good, but solving only with the internal resources of Maxima
is better for common users.
Martin> doesn't (!) simplify automatically like mathematica
Martin> does. This is a great feature, because often I KNOW that
Martin> some expression doesn't simplify. Mathematica then still
Martin> tries, takes quite some time (I had a case with 20 seconds
Martin> per eval on my notebook) and then returns the input nearly
Martin> unchanged! It's important to me that the cas does exactly
Martin> what I tell it to do, no more!
I had the same experience with Mathematica, but now I have the
opposite problem: I wide number of possibilities to simplify but I
cannot find a the logic of the simplifications.
Martin> wonderful interface to emacs that makes debugging easy --
Martin> Mathematica doesn't have this!
This is really fantastic!
Martin> highly portable on every layer (is this correct?)
At least all Unixes and Windows
Martin> very nice integrated doc (I like texinfo and describe!)
Integrated and possibly incomplete! We need to aggregate the
documentation od the old Macsyma ASAP ..
Martin> 3. I like the name Macsyma better...
Well, if the copyright problem is solved we can change the
name. However I think we need not to be stressed by this problem for
the moment.
Finally, thank you Martin for exposing your thoughts.
Bye,
Daniel