Hi Irwin,
Thanks a lot for your interest in Maxima. All of the ideas you presented
are worthwhile. It's just a question of figuring out which are needed most.
Can I ask you to review the messages in this thread, and copy any
new items to the wish list. That would be very helpful.
(http://maxima.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Design%20Notes)
Of the items you listed, generalized functions seem most important
and useful to me. Diffierential equations take second.
Numerical stuff comes after that.
My general feeling is that numerical stuff is less important than
symbolic stuff, just because so many other packages already provide
numerical solutions. But it is still worthwhile to work on numerical stuff.
Although GUI and plotting stuff gets a lot of attention lately,
I don't think it is suitable for a summer project. There is a lot
of stuff already in existence, so you can't just drop in a new feature,
and there are just too many questions of taste (as opposed to
technical questions) to be settled.
I've created a page at the Maxima wiki for Summer of Code
(http://maxima.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?Summer%20of%20Code)
although at this point I don't know what should go there
since there is already a separate wish list page.
Maybe eventually we'll want to use the SOC page for voting or
something, I don't know.
best,
Robert Dodier