On Tue, 16 Jan 2007, Nicolas Pettiaux wrote:
> I still have some ideas:
>
> 1/ help develop some "notebook" program,
There is a "notebook" interface to maxima already: GNU TeXmacs. Rather
than re-inventing all the relevant weels again, it would be better to
improve it. TeXmacs is used as a common interface to a number of free and
commercial CASs (maxima, axiom, yacas, giac, mathemagix, gtybalt,
macaulay, mathematica, maple, mupad, reduce...) and numerical and
graphical programs (octave, scilab, R, gnuplot, graphviz, ...). A user can
cut-and-paste between them. Improvements made to TeXmacs will be useful
not only to maxima, but to many other systems. A good project is a smart
line-splitting in long output expressions.
> 2/ help develop the links with the SAGE project (that puts together
> octave, maxima and others with the help of python)
>
> 2/ help develop the plotting capabilities and easiness of maxima, in
> 2D and 3D through interactive gnuplot or other packages (like VTK for
> 3D, plplot ...)
Here we definitely should use interfaces to existing plotting packages,
not to re-invent the weel. The problem is there are so many of them. Many
are good, but none is ideal (gnuplot, in particular, is not ideal). We
should review the existing possibilities and choose one (or two) which
seems the best, and then write some interface code on the maxima side.
Andrey