Hello from a long-time lurker. Thanks to the developers for all your
effort.
> But may I suggest something else: That those who want to invest some
> effort in yet another GUI consider for a moment whether their time and
> energy wouldn't be better spent enhancing Maxima proper? What use a
> GUI might be when emacs runs on anything I might want to use Maxima on
> is beyond me anyway.
>
For one the lack of a reasonably nice GUI is probably the only barrier
keeping us from using Maxima in our freshman calculus labs (plotting
has come a _long_ way - again thanks to the developers). After years of
using linux computers in a lab for students I can tell you that no
matter how much effort you put in there will always be a sizeable
minority who still struggle at the end of the term with what should be
simple things like copying a file or mounting a floppy or ____ (fill in
the blank with your favorite everyday task) if it is not _exactly_ like
windows. In fact in some ways the closer things seem in the window
manager or file manager etc. to windows, the harder it becomes, as
students try the windows approach rather than read instructions or ask
someone how to do it (the correct approach often being slightly
different from exactly the keystroke/mouseclick combination that would
work in windows), though this is a whole different topic, sorry for
straying. With the already too high pile of stuff to learn adding all
of those C-x C-c emacs combinations is not a viable option (and all
those @!*# C- M- combinations are why I write even lisp code in vi and
just paste things into a lisp REPL running in another xterm if I don't
want to just load the whole file again anyway, but I'm straying again,
sorry).
Probably (though I have no proof) I'm not the only one out there who
might possibly switch a whole bunch of students from Mathematica or
Maple to Maxima, at least some of whom would probably continue to use
Maxima or perhaps even contribute down the line when the course is over,
but I can't justify the _huge_ time commitment to redo assignments when
a nice stable GUI that I won't have to field hundreds of questions on
isn't there. No way is "first install (texmacs or emacs or whatever),
then install maxima, then ...", along with "make sure you've got the CVS
version of ..." a workable solution.
Historically this might be why Mathematica and Maple "won" in the
marketplace, they concentrated on the flashy GUI stuff that they knew
would bring in users. Now at this point I don't get the impression that
Maxima is trying to knock Mathematica and Maple off people's desktops,
and those commercial products are there for people who want a nice GUI
and care less about the symbolic math behind it (basically if it does
Cal I, II, and III with some minimal sort of programming language built
in it will work for probably most of what Mathematica and Maple are used
for anyway), so I'm not saying that working on better symbolic
computation for those who care is not the "right" thing for Maxima. I
am, however, responding to the "beyond me anyway" part of why someone
might care. Right now I use Maxima (almost exclusively from the command
line, by the way, and an improved GUI likely won't do a thing for me
personally) but recognize that my students need a little more hand
holding (for lack of a better term) than the current interfaces provide.
Nate
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