> George believes that one of the reasons for mathematica's success is
> that large
> parts of mathematica are written in mathematica.
I believe Mathematicas success lies in its concept to emphasise lists as its
basic data structure, e.g. there is no distinction between an array and a
matrix and you can easily combine any list dimensions together. Its a simple
all-purpose concept anyone can easily adapt to.
> How programming styles have changed over the last 20 years.
> For example GUI generators that were successful in the late 8
We may remind ourself why the development of open source software is
effective: There is a strong separation of functionality and user interface.
Usually the (command line) tools are developed by a totally different group
of people. Therefore, whats really needed is a mature very well documented
API to a CAS kernel. Communication should at no time be nonspecific about the
meaning of things or the state of the communication partner. I would
appreciate, if maxima is seen as a controller for documents (notebooks) and
does not add insult to injury by trying to give views to these documents. Of
course we should give away a simple proof of concept interface (as xmaxima)
with the package.
Although I know Mr. Fateman doesn't like the idea of a verbose format, I once
again suggest using XML: The DTDs are a strong specification of the language
and human readability speeds up the development process (think of error
checking, unit tests, refactoring).
Kind regards,
Michael