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

I agree, there are many good solutions to the GUI problem.  What I was 
getting at in my posts is that I share the sentiments of those who would 
like to see Maxima on par with Maple/Mathematica/MathCad, and the first 
thing that comes to mind is an improved UI.  I recieve class handouts 
all the time that are done in MathCad, and I have seen screenshots of 
Maple and Mathematica.  From these screenshots, Maxima does not 
compare.  I think it would be great if you could open up some notebook 
program, type some commentary on the problem, give an equation that not 
only displays nice but is linked to Maxima and hence will give you the 
correct solution, maybe generate a plot...in short, show the ends 
without the means, but be able to mix Maxima and text commentary.

TeXmacs is very slow.
wxMaxima is a favorite of mine, but (as far as I can tell) cannot mix 
commentary or embed plots.
iMaxima looks nice, but so far I can't get it set up right.  If I can't 
get it set up right, then neither can my wife, and if she can't then 
most people won't be able to either.
xMaxima...well, the output is not the nicest-looking, now is it?

I reserve commentary on any others since I haven't played with them 
yet.  I think that all of these programs have great features that need 
to be consolidated in some way.

I am coming at this from the perspective that Maxima has the propensity 
to be on par with Maple, etc.  But at the present time there is too much 
behind the scenes setup going on to attract mainstream users.  People 
like pretty-looking things that they can set up with the click of a 
button.  I don't think it's there...yet.  But it can be.  I would love 
to hand in a nice-looking document full of commentary, plots, and 
equations and say "Why yes, I did all of this on Maxima."

-Ron

Richard Fateman wrote:
> 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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