I can't help commenting on these delicate matters: * The removal of Ralf's comments without discussion was certainly not the refined British attitude, however, it would be preposterous if it were the origin of a serious quarrel. One should talk this over and eventually it might be possible to formulate some coding/documentation standard.
* The documentation at http://fricas.github.io/ is simply excellent. Everyone who is really interested can dive into the interiors of the API and the axiom wiki + user group reveal the last secrets. What more can one expect? Of course, cosmetics and validations are an ongoing process. * I can't share any pessimism regarding FriCAS. It's usable, reliable and there is a reasonable release politics (all major platforms). One drop of bitterness is (IMO) that the 'algebra' seems to go out of sync between forks. I'm convinced that sooner or later PanAxiom will experience a revival of the kind which seems impossible at the moment. Who had believed some ten years ago that there are more than half a dozen open source CL distros available today? (and young people are eager to learn cl?). After all I make a plea for a peaceful continuation of the development process. Maybe it would be fruitful to be a bit more verbose in communicating the overall goals and to compose some guidelines for contributions. Happy xmas Kurt ps. I've contributed not one whit so I'm entitled to judge ;) Am 25.12.2014 um 02:31 schrieb Eugene Surowitz: > Ralf is only telling it as it is, > but I wish I could be even as pessimistic as him. > > This is a crisis disguised as another documentation squabble. > As I see the status of PanAxiom: > > OpenAxiom - One developer - little to no activity = dead branch. > FriCAS - One developer - one developer - system being devolved. > Axiom - One developer - when he goes Axiom goes. > > The basic issue that I see is that PanAxiom is really a > software engineering project before it can continue to live. > It brings to mind the Whirlwind project that turned the > early hacked-up computer-like light-bulb testers into > engineering standard replicable devices and spawned an industry. > A significant part its development was thoroughly documenting > what it did and how it did it. > > From the posts over the last year or so, I get these messages: > > Even minimal documentation efforts may either hard to start or > will be too much bother with to add or maintain. Besides who needs it? > As one young lady that I had set to maintaining a large system > with many undocumented changes to it said: > "I didn't know I needed to know archeology." > > The literate approach that Knuth created has no answer to > mass of existing code problem: that is, he didn't think out > a mechanism for the curious to dynamically add insights to > the system's code even if literate. Inverses are sooo.. hard. > > Oh, and PanAxiom has no systematic development of basic numerology. > > Xmas, Gene > > > > > On 12/24/2014 1:24 PM, Martin Baker wrote: >> On 24/12/14 18:12, Ralf Hemmecke wrote: >> > 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. >> >> I strongly agree with Ralf on this documentation issue. >> >> Martin >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
