On Mon, 2006-04-17 at 16:58 -0700, Robert Dodier wrote:
> 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)
>
Sure. I will collect the suggestions here and add them to the wish list.
> 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.
>
For what it's worth, I also agree with you here. There are already a lot
of other libraries that can do numerical computations, and I don't think
that numerical methods are going to bring many people to Maxima. But,
maybe I'm wrong.
> 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.
Sounds good. If things work out, Google will accept Maxima has a
mentoring organization. If not, then this has at least served as a
worthwhile discussion for items that should go into Maxima.
Cheers,
Irwin