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

There are many half-way or better solutions to this GUI problem;
Texmacs can run on windows via Cygwin, for example.
There are other programs like Scientific Word, Matlab+Symbolic
Toolkit, Mathcad, imaxima, emaxima, wxmaxima xmaxima,
Axiom. Some of these are free.

And there are also Maple, Mathematica, Mupad

Making another word processing program that does TeX-like
stuff is not the key to make Maxima the choice of professionals,
in my opinion.

But that will not deter people. People will continue to experiment
with GUIs and such.

Fortunately  they will not have to know much about
Macsyma/Maxima; some of them have been built knowing very
little, already.    so perhaps it is not really necessary to mentor them
from the sourceforge/maxima people.

People who know about math, algorithms (numeric, symbolic), would
be much more valuable to contribute constructive mathematics to
Maxima. Perhaps reverse-engineering from M or M.  Of course
anything that is produced in an open source form can be, with modest
effort, transported to M or M. so "competition" is probably
not something one can "win" here.
Just doing interesting and fun stuff, making programs clever and fast,
that's what I'd like to see.
RJF


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ron Crummett" <rcrummett at uidaho.edu>
To: <maxima at math.utexas.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 8:33 PM
Subject: Re: [Maxima] 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
>
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