On 12/22/2014 12:42 AM, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> AFAICS this was not a derivation. The line
>
> concat(frst(f1), rst(f1) + p1 + concat(rpSt(n, 0), f1*p1))
>
> is a recursive formula written using Spad.
How many people know what rpSt is?
> ...
> Derivation is simple, so it is better to omit it (as I and _you_
> did) -- reader can easily reconstruct it.
If you believe it was easy without the knowledge of the specification of
prodiag1, then either you are wrong or I am stupid. I felt like
needlessly wasting my time over this. And you even did not commit my
comments that IMHO would help others to waste less time.
> This kind of comments help if reader is unfamiliar with Spad,
> but otherwise just adds bulk to the file. Bulk is bad because
> every reader will spent more time reading and internalizing
> what was written.
IMHO, this is wrong. Knowing SPAD is rather unimportant. What counts is
the mathematical background and the kind of algorithm that is used. And
that is missing and is tacitly hidden inside the SPAD code.
> Note: I expect that active and interested
> reader will re-derive the formula. Adding more detail will
> not help and may hurt turning the reade to "passive mode".
Well, you expect every potential new developer to invest much time, so
you basically treat them as if they were your students. Can you count
how many active developer FriCAS has? I would have counted me as one,
but then the above tells me the I am required to waste my time. Why
would I want to do that? It's totally ineffective and frustrating. It's
not freely sharing knowledge.
I guess, it would be better to lower the barrier to enter FriCAS
development rather than requiring new people to deeply dive into SPAD
code and to analyse what the code actually does even if they certainly
come with zero knowledge of the library but know the SPAD keywords.
> To put is differently: your addition would be good in a
> tutorial.
... that nobody will ever write...
> But I bet that reader facing substantial amount
> of code with such documentation will quickly give up
> due to bulk of text to read.
How many people have you met that tell you this? You must have knowledge
of a big FriCAS community that I haven't heard of.
> Some readers will learn Spad and used conventions
Why would they do that in the first place? BTW, where are the
conventions written down?
> and for them extra text will be tiring.
> Other will give up deciding that the whole thing
> is too hard.
Pure speculation.
But since nobody on this mailing list stands up and speaks otherwise,
either you are right or there are no developers.
> When I was teaching introductory programming course given task
> "turn this formula(s) into code" or even "what this piece
> of code is doing" students did quite well.
I have yet to see someone who can tell, what exactly the following
Mathematica program computes and whether this program is correct.
foo[a_, b_] := (
If[a > 0,
If[TrueQ[a > b], Return[foo[b, a]]];
Return[foo[b-a, a]]
];
Return[b]
);
> So I want to have more documentation, but apparently
> different documentation that you would like to write...
You are the leader of FriCAS and you have the right to set your
standards and conventions.
It's open source development so I don't have to agree with you and can
choose to invest my time into something that doesn't make me unhappy.
Ralf
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