Michel Talon wrote:
> Richard Fateman wrote:
>
>
>> Getting a superb GUI on Windows for a particular Lisp would probably
>> cover 90% of Maxima users or more. (According to Gartner group, 95% of
>> all PCs run Windows, 3% MacOS, 2% Linux)
>>
>>
>
> I think this is total crap.
If you look at the download statistics for the Maxima project on
sourceforge, you will see that your
opinion is not supported by the facts.
...
> This is even more true for maxima, since
> they would run Maple or Mathematica if they did not have strong prejudice
> against non free software.
I do not follow your logic. If you bought a machine for (as little as)
$400 with Windows, why does that mean
you are willing to spend more money for Maple or Mathematica?
> By the way, a good documentation would be far
> more useful to advance the use of maxima than a completely useless GUI.
>
Good documentation would be more useful in any case.
> At present, the main objection my colleagues have against Maxima is the lack
> of proper documentation (the info manual is barely one, being extremely
> cryptic, and difficult to search) and sometimes the slowness.
>
Perhaps you would like to look at the commercial Macsyma manuals, which
document a similar system.
Look in docs/refman16.pdf for example.
start at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/macsyma/
There are also rather large documents for the frontend and graphics
component of that system.
These may not be especially good either, unfortunately.
>
>
>