>> Note, though, that unlike Mathematica, you cannot write "2 Pi" or even
>> "2 pi". You must write "2 * %pi". How irritating...
>
> Its not so bad....

No, just irritating.

> And .... what's with the lack of love for Lisp?

People say "Lisp is a beautiful language; everything is a list". Which 
is a nice idea. But when you actually look at the language, it's kludgy 
and ad hoc, with lots of crufty backwards-compatibility junk. No thanks.

> Though using * for multiplication is a bit annoying, It's not really a
> dealbreaker for me.

It just irritates me, that's all.

> It still does a reasonably good job of solving and
> expanding equations, and the wx version makes nice output. You can also
> grab the output in TeX format, as well.

I love the way that neither Mathematica nor Maxima have yet heard of 
this cool innovation called *anti-aliased graphics*. :-P Although, 
Mathematica at least manages to do AA on text, with Maxima doesn't.

Maxima provides two plotting commands. The plot2d() function calls 
GNUplot to do its work (and hence has all the limitations of GNUplot), 
while the wxplot2d() function plots in the window itself (and hence is 
even more limited). In either case, it's maddeningly difficult to make 
it plot what you actually want.

Reading through the FAQ, it quickly becomes clear that Maxima isn't 
nearly as polished as Mathematica. Lots of statements like "if you want 
to solve an equation that looks like this, use foo(), but if that 
doesn't work you could try bar(), but if the equation has a form more 
like this then bar() won't work and you have to use baz() which uses a 
different algorithm internally". In Mathematica, you'd just say "solve 
this, now" and it uses 20 years of R&D and production refinement to 
compute the answer any way it can.

I also love the way Maxima defaults to machine-precision and you have to 
explicitly request arbitrary precision. Oh, but some functions don't 
actually *support* arbitrary precision. (I don't know what happens in 
that case - whether you get no answer or a wrong answer or an error 
message or what.)

I haven't even looked at the possibility of programming in Maxima. Hell, 
I don't know if it's even *possible*. Mathematica is basically a 
powerful pattern-matching engine, and you can program new patterns into 
it and it will transform them. I have no idea if Maxima can do that.

But most of all, when I got the trial version of Mathematica what I 
quickly discovered is that most of the equations I want to solve do not 
possess a closed-form solution anyway. And in fact, as awesome as 
Mathematica is, it turns out I don't really need a CAS for anything. And 
if I do, I can usually trick Wolfram Alpha into doing what I want. (And 
since that's powered by Mathematica, it gives you the correct answer - 
assuming you can make it comprehend the question...)

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