Dear Ted and Robert,
I would like to offer you every encouragement to develop the Maxima
interface.
At the moment I am using wxMaxima with engineering students working at
approximately 2nd year university level (Scottish HND Mechanical
Engineering). They have taken to it well and I am hoping that the work
we have done will stand them in good stead for using programs such as
Mathcad, Maple and Matlab which they may encounter in employment or at
university.
The other program I make a lot of use of is Geogebra. I noticed that
Mathrider, of course, works with Geogebra and it would be excellent if
Maxima could use Geogebra as an alternative to Gnuplot for 2d graphs.
(Geogebra will eventually be able to plot in 3d as well). I intend to
write to the Geogebra developers on the same topic.
My original intention was to use Mathcad with the HND students but
through a lucky accident due to a licensing problem I had to use Maxima.
Certainly a Mathcad type interface would be great but wxMaxima has some
excellent features and it is simple for the students to use.
Even such possibly mundane features such as no implicit multiplication
being allowed is great. Due to modern calculator input some students
take a while to learn this and, as a consequence, other things such as
the fact that there isn't a multiplication sign between sin and x show up.
Best Regards,
Peter