In another thread Javed wrote:
> If you guys are so hot on improving the state of computation and making the
> math packages available to general public like me who are willing to put
> some time to go through the program and even utilize it in teaching against
> all the opposition from other faculty who are hell bent on using the 4
> commercially available programs then why not concentrate on improving the
> user interface to the already existing math compute engines such as Maxima,
> R, Octvae and Scielab.
By coincidence, I released a new application today called MathRider
which is designed to help with the open source mathematics user
interface problem you refer to:
http://mathrider.org
I was a support developer with the Sage project for almost a year
before leaving a few months ago when the core Sage developers decided
to focus Sage on research instead of education. When I was with the
project my goals included 1) discovering ways to apply Sage at the
high school and early college level and 2) Sage marketing (the Sage
leadership set a goal of achieving a million+ users and I spent a
significant amount of time coming up with ways to accomplish this).
MathRider got its start as a more powerful alternative to the Sage
notebook which was capable of helping achieve these goals.
MathRider currently contains a fork of Yacas I made (called Piper) as
its default computer algebra system and I have Maxima working at an
experimental level. I also integrated Maxima's version of Lisp into
MathRider because Piper is built on top of a small Lisp interpreter
and I have been learning Lisp so I can better understand how Piper
works. (BTW, learning Lisp has been a delightfully mind-expanding
experience so far. For those who are interested, here is what Lisp
code looks like in a MathRider "fold":)
https://mathrider.dev.java.net/files/documents/8496/100677/maxima_lisp_in_mathrider.html
Anyway, MathRider is very powerful and extensible and now that Piper
is working reasonably well with it I would like to spend some time
improving its Maxima and Maxima/Lisp support.
What I need are ideas on how a front-end application like MathRider
can help users interact with Maxima more effectively. Any ideas are
welcome, including unconventional "blue sky" ones (for example, ideas
based on rich 3D graphics).
Respectfully,
Ted Kosan