Seeking areas of little or weak documentation

I think just about any topic in Maxima could benefit from intelligent
documentation.

Today, each section (e.g. polynomials) is organized alphabetically by
function.  That is fine if you know what function you want, but very hard to
use if you're trying to get something accomplished and don't know how.  The
problem is that it's not clear what resources a tech writer could use to
write this up in a goal-oriented way.  There is lots of useful information
in the mailing list archives, but it is *a lot* of material.

                -s


On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 16:21, Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote:

> Sol Lederman wrote:
>
> > Henry and Richard,
> >
> > Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoroughly to my post.
> >
> > I see a common thread in your responses -- that there are areas of Maxima
> > where information is not well organized/catalogued.
> >
>
> One of the areas which would benefit from a better documentation is the
> part
> 36, Rules and patterns. This is a difficult subject, and frequently
> questions about it appear in this forum. By collecting all this
> information,
> and playing with the program, perhaps one could enhance this documentation.
> This is a set of features which work very well in Mathematica and are very
> well documented in the Mathematica book. This perhaps could help as
> example.
> Robert Dodier is the expert on these features, he certainly could also
> help.
>
> In another department, R. Toy has recently added lbfgs to the share
> directory. I suppose this is related to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFGS_method
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-BFGS
> but there is zero documentation. this would be a target for experimentation
> and documentation on a limited domain.
>
> I would say the same for colnew but i am working on it, because i have
> special interest on this program.
>
> There are other interesting programs which are presently broken such as
> share/gentran. Dan Stanger is working on that, probably it will be an
> interesting target of documentation  because gentran functionality is nice.
>
>
>
> --
> Michel Talon
>
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