Subject: Slightly OT: student usage of Maxima vs Maple
From: Michel Talon
Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 23:47:19 +0200
Javed Alam wrote:
> Dotan
>
>
> Therefore, I am experimenting with two packages mainly Maxima and Scilab
> for now and I would like to add Octave to the mix. Here is a complete
> course that is based upon these two packages I have taught in the past.
>
>
I have used scilab for a research work i have done, and have found it *very*
useful (even if the command interpreter is somewhat buggy). In my opinion
Octave is far less useful, if not quite useless. On the formal side, i like
Maxima and Mathematica, much less Maple. Mathematica has this advantage that
it knows a lot of integrals, etc. and gives simplified results without any
fuss. The problem of Maxima is that there are too many commands, it
requires a lot of time to learn it, but it works well. Maple is faster for
some types of computations (notably all sorts of polynomial stuff) but
these are not the sorts of computations i need. Given that scilab and
maxima are free (in both senses) i think this is an overwhelming advantage.
--
Michel Talon