Feature request (was "parallel cell executing and wxmaxima")

> Of course (a) your lisp may not have mapcar-parallel, or anything
> even remotely like that,
> but just calls to some operating system function, or not even that...
> and (b) this solves none of the important problems involving shared state,
> and (c) it may fail to be faster for any number of reasons,
> and (d) it may fail when simply serial evaluation would be fine.
>

We use Maxima as a "specification language" and for experimentation.
Working mostly with discrete/combinatorial objects and algorithms,
where Maxima allows to express the algorithms at an abstract level
in a very simple way. It's excessively slow, but we (try to ;-))
see that as a "feature, not a bug". In our main field, partitioning
the computational task in many small independent tasks is very
easy and natural, and so it would be good if these algorithms could
also be expressed abstractly ("in a nutshell") at Maxima level, so
that students can easily write such algorithms and experiment with them.

> If is our goal to include in Maxima all popular ideas in computing,
> I think that parallel computing is
> so "move along, nothing to see here."
> 
>  I think anyone with a truly modern outlook would be putting Maxima
> "in the cloud"
> Use something like Tilu, sorta like Maxima|Alpha   :)
> 
> Why isn't there are Maxima facebook page? {come to think of it, why not? )
> 
> What about a voice (Siri-like) input to Maxima on iphone etc?
> {actually, I can help with this:}
> 
> 

I'm perfectly happy with the Maxima command-line.
Efforts like above for "cool user-interfaces" I fear would be
detrimental to Maxima, since it makes the system more complex
(and creates dependencies).

Oliver