Marketing (Was: Will Free Axiom change our world?)

On Mon, 21 Apr 2003, Martin RUBEY wrote:

> ...I'm pretty sure that maxima can be made *very* fast.  Simply
> monitor your code (this should be possible with metering.lisp), take out
> the slow bits and rewrite them in lisp. 

Easy enough to say.  Possibly easy to do IF you are one of those people
who can understand lisp.  From my own experience, though, that's only a
small fraction of the potential user base.

Perhaps you all, being involved in maxima development (and thus lisp
users) don't realize this, but there are many otherwise intelligent people
who simply don't have the mental quirk that's needed to think in lisp.  
Indeed, I've sometimes speculated that the ability is genetic, like color
blindness or the ability to roll your tongue in a circle.  It has little
or nothing to do with intelligence: with sufficient effort I could, I
believe, come up with an algorithm that would do anything that maxima
does, but it wouldn't be expressed in a form that could be written in
lisp.  Nor, if you gave me the uncommented lisp code for such a task,
would I ever be able to figure out what it does.

I think that may in the long run be the biggest obstacle to maxima's
growth: simply finding the people who are both interested and able to work
on the project.

James