Jay Belanger <belanger <at> truman.edu> writes:
> > The say: Please eliminate thoses ideas that no one can foresee.
>
> What ideas are those?
My point is this one:
Suppose I'm a student and i am begining with vector calculus,
I should expect that divergence was define as:
divergence(f):=[diff(f,x),diff(f,y),diff(f,z)];
and grad, curl, etc in similar terms.
I think this can be done in 30 minutes or less, but the current package
is complicated (in my opinion).
Read the recents questions about rk to see the problems with list and matrices.
I can't understand why things are not easier. You can say that there is
nobody interested, or nobody working on making things easier, but the
concept or the philosophy seem to me to be in a wrong direction.
We should strive to make the system easy for students, and i don't see this
here.
I may be wrong, but i can't understand why grad, curl, etc are not defined
in the easy way, or why there is not a simple package for beginners.
If you say that is because few people are working on maxima I can't believe it!
My point is contrary to arbitrary complication.
If you tell me that this system is design for expert mathematicians to
make calculations and not for students, then all has a sense, but I
believe that this is not situation nowadays.
Also I think that maxima matrices should change to be similar to any other
language.