Interesting Comment re Mathematica vs Everybody Else

On Mon, Nov 19, 2007 at 11:07:39AM -0700, Robert Dodier wrote:
> On Nov 19, 2007 9:20 AM, Daniel Lakeland <dlakelan at street-artists.org> wrote:

> I also believe that Maxima has a lot of potential as the tool of
> choice for mixed symbolic and numerical problems.
> This includes pretty much all of engineering.

Amen brother :-)

> Like you I;m puzzled as to why Excel is so popular with engineers.

In my work, it comes down to engineers not knowing anything about
other tools, combined with a very concrete view of computing. I've
seen engineers repeatedly specify HOW to make what they want rather
than simply tell me what they want. (ie. for every unique item in the
first column, look up the value associated in this other spreadsheet
and average the values of the three columns to the left of that value,
and then add up the averaged values and take the logarithm.... instead
of saying "I want the logarithm of the sum of the averages of the
temperature coefficients for each material".) Also, engineers tend to
be much more comfortable with floating point numbers than with symbols
and formulae.

> I'm not comfortable with DWIM, as it requires making assumptions.
> Better still, and consonant with Maxima's general development over
> the decades, is IDNKWYMSIWLYFIOL (I don't know what you mean
> so I'll let you figure it out later, i.e. I;m not going to barf on stuff I
> don't recognize).

I think we mean a similar thing. Perhaps DWIM isn't the right
terminology. In any case, for example, when I say
taylor(1+sin(x),x,0,3) I expect to be able to treat the result mostly
like a polynomial. If it has any important differences it shouldn't
prevent me from using the result like a polynomial when those
differences are unimportant. On the other hand Axiom makes me think
carefully about the type of each object, and carefully cast that type,
and carefully specify the types of all the arguments of the functions
I write... far too pedantic for a scratchpad type use. (I'm sure it's
useful for a mathematician trying to write one of those papers Richard
mentioned ;-)).




-- 
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan