At your lack of comment on wxMaxima. I would have expected some remark...

I remember some time ago you posting about how horrible the pricing if 
Mathematica is ... I thought for sure you'd have some interest in a GPL 
tool that can do some of the core things + it uses LISP.

Hmm... maybe the girl has gone to your head? ;)
-- 
~Mike

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On 04/10/2010 03:19 PM, Mike Raiford wrote:
> At your lack of comment on wxMaxima. I would have expected some remark...
>
> I remember some time ago you posting about how horrible the pricing if
> Mathematica is ... I thought for sure you'd have some interest in a GPL
> tool that can do some of the core things + it uses LISP.

Yeah, well, I've used a couple of programs that are meant to be "like 
Mathematica, but free". Every single one of them has sucked beyond 
belief. A few of them can solve easy equations or do very simple 
graphing, but none of them come close to the power and sophistication of 
Mathematica.

Of course, when you consider that Mathematica has had tends of thousands 
of man-years of R&D poured into it over the last 22 years, it's kind of 
unsurprising that it's so good. (In fact, it's surprising it's not even 
better, come to think of it. Why the **** doesn't it do anti-aliased 
graphics yet?!)

Also: I hate Lisp.

> Hmm... maybe the girl has gone to your head? ;)

It's not my *head* that's... uh... never mind. ;-)

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On 04/10/2010 03:19 PM, Mike Raiford wrote:
> > At your lack of comment on wxMaxima. I would have expected some remark...
> >
> Also: I hate Lisp.

yeah, we all knew it comes down to this, you weeny.

In any case, browsing through the pictures:

http://maxima.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

I only see usual math formulas in usual ambiguous infix syntax and common
function syntax, which means Maxima is only written in Lisp, not that its user
interface uses it.

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>> Also: I hate Lisp.
>
> yeah, we all knew it comes down to this, you weeny.

I only meant that "it's written in Lisp" is no particular 
recommendation, as far as I'm concerned.

> I only see usual math formulas in usual ambiguous infix syntax and common
> function syntax, which means Maxima is only written in Lisp, not that its user
> interface uses it.

Yes, quite.

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

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Invisible escreveu:
>>> Also: I hate Lisp.
>>
>> yeah, we all knew it comes down to this, you weeny.
> 
> I only meant that "it's written in Lisp" is no particular 
> recommendation, as far as I'm concerned.

but who was recommending it on the basis that "it's written in Lisp"?

>> I only see usual math formulas in usual ambiguous infix syntax and common
>> function syntax, which means Maxima is only written in Lisp, not that 
>> its user
>> interface uses it.
> 
> Yes, quite.
> 
> Note, though, that unlike Mathematica, you cannot write "2 Pi" or even 
> "2 pi". You must write "2 * %pi". How irritating...

hmm... if that's the case, seems like the user interface is just sugared 
Lisp macros... :p

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

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On 10/4/2010 10:47 AM, Invisible wrote:

> 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.... I suppose if the %(special character) notation 
bothered you, you could technically define variables as the special 
characters and use them instead. Heck, you could define a batch that 
does this and include it in the init.

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

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




-- 
~Mike

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>> 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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On 10/5/2010 8:52 AM, Invisible wrote:
>>> 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 seems to AA text just fine. If you're using the TeX fonts for 
JSMath, All of the Symbols like summation, product, integration, etc... 
are drawn using the OS font rendering engine, so, under Windows I get 
everything rendered with ClearType.

> 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.

Plot is really basic. Draw has more capability

> 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.

Now, that /is/ irritating. I have encountered some of the rough edges 
like this already

> 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.

Maxima is very programmable, you can go as far as defining your own 
infix operators and such, and even further than that right down to Lisp

> 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...)

What I like about Alpha is that I can actually learn something from it 
in some cases. Maxima just produces the final result, whereas Wolfram 
Alpha will sometimes have "possible" intermediate steps. I like to know 
how something was arrived at. Rather than simply accepting the answer 
spit back. But for piddling around with mathematics and not being at the 
mercy of an internet connection, Maxima works for me.

-- 
~Mike

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> writes:

> On 04/10/2010 03:19 PM, Mike Raiford wrote:
>> At your lack of comment on wxMaxima. I would have expected some remark...
>>
>> I remember some time ago you posting about how horrible the pricing if
>> Mathematica is ... I thought for sure you'd have some interest in a GPL
>> tool that can do some of the core things + it uses LISP.
>
> Yeah, well, I've used a couple of programs that are meant to be "like
> Mathematica, but free". Every single one of them has sucked beyond
> belief. A few of them can solve easy equations or do very simple

Ever tried Sage?

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>> Yeah, well, I've used a couple of programs that are meant to be "like
>> Mathematica, but free". Every single one of them has sucked beyond
>> belief. A few of them can solve easy equations or do very simple
>
> Ever tried Sage?

Yes, but I'm not seeing the connection...

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