--- Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
> Rather than having 4 people write another graphics package for Maxima
> to replace the packages that exist (I don't know if they work, but
> Xmaxima plots for me..), why not write something that doesn't already
> exist.
It's mostly a case of none of the available tools being as good as we
would like. Eventually, when a new GUI is created for Maxima, it would
be desirable to create a plotting solution for Maxima that works well
with it and is smoothly cross platform. For now, I think gnuplot does
fairly well - at least, I can live with it.
The current Xmaxima plotting works most of the time, but feels kludgy
to me - it doesn't handle window resizing at all well, for example.
> Having just looked at the list of product offerings from Mathworks
> (vendors of Matlab), why not pick your favorite toolkit and see what
> you can do symbolically. e.g. signal processing, control systems,
> financial computations, pdes, ....
That kind of programming demands an altogether different level of
skill, I think - at least, it requires understanding the subject well
enough to recognize how to code and debug it. Graphics and plotting is
not in itself heavy in high mathematics - obtaining the numbers to plot
can be handed off to another routine. Plotting features like proper
interactive editing of labels, nice gradient color algorithms, etc.
might not be so crucial mathematically, but they do make for a polished
product. If someone doesn't feel they are able to handle the
mathematical programming, there is certainly no harm in them improving
the plotting. Perhaps I'm overestimating the difficulty of programming
mathematical routines?
CY
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