Re: Rats; Fwd: [Soc2006support] Letter of intent for Maxima project to participate in SOC as a mentoring organization

Andrey G. Grozin wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Apr 2006, Ron Crummett wrote:
>> The first thing that comes to mind for me is a notebook program, 
>> something where you could write some commentary, include a 
>> nice-looking equation, maybe imbed a plot.  Maybe some sort of 
>> OpenOffice plugin or something.  From what I can tell, there isn't 
>> anything like that yet (if I'm wrong, please don't rake me across the 
>> coals, just kindly point me in the right direction).  It seems like 
>> iMaxima might come close but I can't set it up to tell.
> TeXmacs interface to maxima can do all of this.
True, TeXmacs can do all of the things I mentioned earlier, but my 
experience with TeXmacs is that it is quite slow and I have been very 
successful in getting it to hang.  I have also struggled in the past 
when trying to load the vector functions, for instance.  I tried doing 
this once and thought they were loaded; only when I was completely done 
with working out a project did I realize that this was not the case. 

It also seems like most of the present solutions are not as 
user-friendly as they could be.  If I want to learn Maxima I want to be 
able to spend my time learning Maxima, not also learning 
emacs/TeXmacs/whatever so that I can use Maxima...and I'm a pretty 
patient guy.  As far as a mainstream solution goes, I don't think most 
people would go for that.  (When we bought my wife a laptop, the first 
thing she told me was that I couldn't install Linux on it.)

-Ron