Please suffer a newbie with no Macsyma experience to offer some commentary:
Are things really so bad?
I get the impression that quite a few people are using Maxima who are
really pining for Macsyma. This is perfectly reasonable and beyond
reproach: if you like Macsyma and now do not have access to it, your
choice has been diminished and you have every right to try to revive
Macsyma, or create something very Macsyma-like.
However, let's not forget that getting Maxima GPL'd offers some new
opportunities. For one, Maxima is unlikely to ever disappear as Macsyma
essentially has (for now, anyway). Is it "wasted brain" to replicate
Macsyma features from scratch? Perhaps, but it's brain more safely
invested. I'm investing brain in learning Maxima because it will almost
certainly always be there, and no one can take it from me. I could
probably hit my boss up for Mathematica, but I'm going with Maxima instead.
Bugs? We can clean up bugs. Open-source is great for that. We might
clean up bugs that Symbolics didn't know about. In time Maxima may develop
in ways Macsyma never did, and we'll have bugs Macsyma never had. ;^) We
may as well get used to it now.
What's less obvious is that open-source software is often extended in
interesting, unpredictable ways. We might not match Macsyma feature for
feature, but I'll bet that if development continues, and we have an active
community, we will begin seeing new features that Macsyma doesn't have, in
fact features that Symbolics, Inc.'s marketing department would never have
thought of in a millenium. It's surprising what can happen when users have
freedom....
I've been very impressed by what can happen with open-source software by
following the R project (www.r-project.org), a GPL implementation of the S
statistical programming language (www.insightful.com is the main licensee).
I first heard about R back in '96 or so, when I heard that two guys were
implementing the S language using Scheme. "They must have way too much
time on their hands!" I thought at the time. R was a toy then, and for
some years afterward it continued to be a toy. But it caught on,
development accelerated, and now it is, in my opinion, the most complete,
accurate, and reliable statistical analysis package available, bar none.
Plus it has been extended in surprising ways: there's an R package for
Zope to support incorporating statistical analysis and graphics on the web;
there's an R module for PostgreSQL, so statistical routines can be
incorporated with the database engine; it's been linked to Xgobi for
dynamic graphics; it's been ported to handhelds (running Linux). And on
and on. If you visit the web site, check out the list of contributed
packages ("package sources"). Furthermore, there are additional
open-source projects founded on R (www.bioconductor.org, for instance).
We're seeing a surprising flowering of statistical/numerical computing
activity in the open-source world.
If Maxima catches on in a similar way, there's no telling what it could
look like in 5 or 10 years. Perhaps not Macsyma, perhaps better than
Macsyma, perhaps doing things no one ever thought to do with Macsyma.
Or, like many open-source projects, Maxima could sink into obscurity. It
all depends on the community. It seems that, even though Maxima has been
GPL'd since 1998, these are early days in the life of Maxima, and activity
is occurring (reorganizing after Dr. Schelter's death, new web site, nice
manual in the works....). If we're concerned about Maxima, perhaps the
most important thing we could do is help the community grow by spreading
the word. Though it may fall short of Macsyma at the moment, it seems good
enough to me to warrant interest from many people who may not yet know
about it.
Regards,
Jim Garrett
An optimistic Maxima user (and potential future contributor)
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