On 11/17/06, Daniel Lakeland <dlakelan at street-artists.org> wrote:
> The combination of R and maxima is unbelievably useful and I only wish
> that they were available when I was in school in the mid 1990's.
Agreed 100% with your comments about Maxima and R.
The useful features of R include (at least) fast matrix operations,
data sets (called frames) as built-in objects, math functions
for statistics, a lot of add-on packages for statistics,
good documentation, and nice plots (with a nice interface).
Maxima has some of each of these; what would be really great
is to bring Maxima up to the level of R for each one.
Maxima might already have most or all of the math functions,
but the other topics need work, I believe.
> When I recently returned to school to study Civil Engineering I tried
> to encourage all the students I met to learn these and other
> computational tools. Unfortunately I had little effect compared to the
> extremely common and baroque use of Excel.
A notebook interface for Maxima could allow, among other things,
embedding matrices and plots into a live document.
I believe that could go a long way towards satisfying the
demand for Excel.
Robert