Sage hit slashdot (and slashdot it back, I'm sure). One anonymous coward posted the following quote which I find worth preserving. The Crystal idea is a bit beyond what he's thinking but I think he's on the right track.
I am a mathematician and shelling out a few hundred or even thousand bucks for software is not a problem. A problem is that there is that there is a gap in tools. There is one tool missing that would make math much more accessible. The tool an IDE. Most IDEs that exist for witting math are modeled after software development IDEs. But those do not at all parallel how mathematicians think or write. We end up with a lot of paper and books in higher math (post introductory undergrad level) that are written in plain text. Diagrams are very few and cross-references are often unintuitive. If there was a tool that allowed to write math as easily as code is written in vi (or emacs... please wait until Sunday morning for this flame war... that's what Sunday mornings are for), to create diagrams as easily as AutoCad creates mechanical drawings, that would realize that an item of text maybe best served with a commutative diagram (which it would immediately offer to draw) and that another part of the text is probably a bibliography reference, then math would be developed as well as software is. Basically, all the tools out there are still trying to give mathematicians the freedom to write anything that would write on paper. There is no tool that is really context-aware. If such a tool did exist, it would leave all the others in the dust. Cost would not matter. It would be to Mathematica what KDE is to Windows desktop. Perhaps, this is too much to ask for. Perhaps, a better start would be a language that captured the thought process of writing math the way that emacs captured the thought process of witting different types of text. And no TeX is not it. TeX only helps to typeset math to make it look pretty. It doesn't make witting math on a computer easier than writing it by hand. Tim _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
