Why do you prefer to work with Maxima?



On 2012-11-26, Fereshteh Zeynivand <fzeynivand at gmail.com> wrote:

> May I have some reasons about choosing Maixma to work with in differential
> equation? I mean why do you choose Maxima to work with, for example why not
> Matlab or Maple?

Well, there are various things I like about Maxima.

 * open source project -- I get to tinker with stuff; workshop atmosphere
   on mailing list
 * combination of symbolic and numerical capabilities
 * broad scope of capabilities
 * laissez-faire attitude toward expressions -- meaning is imposed by user
 * general look-n-feel inherited from Lisp

And for good measure there are a few things I don't like. To some extent
I'm trying to change these.

 * long-standing bugs in code which is not easily fixed or replaced
 * primitive programming language (dynamic scope, interpreted, no means
   of structuring large programs, missing general-purpose stuff
   generally available these days, confused array types)

Hope this helps,

Robert Dodier