How install/run MockMMA??? needs Maxima to run?

--- Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:

> This is correct as far as it goes.  It doesn't address what is
> the inefficiency of this approach to communicate.  Let us say
> you are sitting next to a friend.  You want to go to
> lunch and you are about to say "Hey, did you eat yet?".  But then
> you think:  it is simple to type this into a string and email
> it to my friend's laptop for processing.  And just to make sure it is
> simple, you type it in French, because you think  (but you are not 
> positive) that your colleague can read French.

LOL I am reminded of a userfriendly sequence where a geek wants to ask
a girl out but doesn't know how to express himself outside of the
computer.  I suspect many of the more junior of us are on similar terms
with lisp :-)

> In other words, you are proposing to do something in a complicated
> and unreliable and slow way, compared to the really simple, reliable,
> and fast way.

If you can handle lisp.  Plus, graphics and lisp seem to mix poorly
right now, although Garnet and McCLIM may change that.
 
> If your colleague were in France, it would be different!
> > 
> >>*Why* is it really hard to make some sort of Maxima shared object
> >> or library that we can access from another object?
> 
> It is not hard at all, if the shared object is going to
> be accessed from Lisp or even C.  There are also CORBA, OLE, and Java
> beans things in some lisps.  But these are again like "why don't we 
> all speak another languages just for the fun of it".

Ah yes, CORBA. The Berlin windowing system seems to make good use of
CORBA, but its complexity is going to hinder its wide acceptance. 
There was a sourceforge project to create a lisp orb, but I think it
stalled. If Berlin ever replaces X (like twenty years from now
probably) it might be interesting to try to impliment a GUI via a lisp
orb.  Definitely not worth the effort for the foreseeable future
though.

> I suspect that every computer algebra system that is not written in
> lisp is an example of Phil Greenspun's 10th rule of programming.
> 
> "Any suffciently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc,
> informally-specified bugridden implementation of half of Common Lisp.
> — Philip Greenspun, 10th rule of programming"

Funny you should say that - I believe Yacas had to impliment some lisp
like functionality in their system to make it work.  I always liked
that quote. People are so used to the newest being the best in
computers, but it's not always true.  Lisp is a great example of that -
it's almost a language that had to wait decades for the hardware to
catch up to.

CY

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com