On Thursday 22 September 2005 11:40 pm, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > > That battle is raging right now in the web development arena, and > "strongly typed" and "static" languages are taking a beating by dynamic > environments like Ruby, Python, Perl and PHP. Let's face it ... people > who program for a living like dynamic languages and hate static ones. If > the "industry" couldn't hire thousands of inexpensive C programmers, the > language would have died out except as an "assembler" for dynamic > language interpreters and the Linux kernel. :)
Well, to be fair, I think it's a question of what the programmer is trying to accomplish. For quick prototyping and getting ones ideas into workable for as rapidly as possible, I agree dynamic languages are probably the tool of choice (e.g., Lisp.) For doing something as correctly as possible, however, I'm not so sure. I think the CAS field is a bit unique currently in being really interested in correctness. (Or at least, some parts of it.) > Well, in the for-profit world, I use Derive. It does everything I need > at a fraction of the price of the others. MuPad isn't really "free" as > in either freedom or beer. In the free world, I mostly use Maxima, and > then only on Linux. Maxima is pretty much useless to me, though, unless > I also have TeXmacs to typeset my math and mix in text with it. Right - Axiom doesn't have enough mindshare right now to challenge even Maxima in "popularity." I would argue that this isn't necessarily a bad thing - I would expect Axiom to be less of a "phenomenon" until it reaches a point where it is competitive, which will take longer when developing for correctness is the first concern. > As to verifiable correctness, a similar situation has occurred in the > numerical world with such things as interval arithmetic and floating > point computations based on provable properties of the arithmetic. What > happens is that the computational cost and complexity of the > implementation are significant and so it doesn't get done. "Cheap and > good enough" trumps "expensive and perfect" unless there *isn't* a "good > enough". I'm hoping open source will allow us to short circuit those economic limitations to some extent. If we can create a really good system, perhaps we can move the "good enough" yardstick further out. > I think you may be seeing the same sort of thing trying to pair CAS with > proof engines. In a way, your challenge may be worse than the challenge > of getting verifiable numerical calculations adopted, because both CAS > and theorem proving rapidly get into NP-Complete and NP-Hard problems, > whereas the worst-case numerical algorithms in common use are N**4. > They're both nice dreams for computationalists, though. :) Well, dreams are what great accomplishments start as :-). I think both verifiable numerical computations and smart integration with proof systems could go a long way towards making Axiom not just another entry in the CAS market but a fundamentally new type of software - maybe even a "killer app" in relevant mathematical and scientific areas. Of course, I'm not really qualified to have dreams like this yet :-). Maybe after a few years of studying up on the issue I'll know why it's not worth doing :-/. Cheers, CY _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
