Hi Ralf & oldk1331 asked me to detail my first impressions as a user approaching FriCAS. Below you'll find a reasoned (time-consuming) list where I tried to (fearlessly and pitilessly) pinpoint what appears to be "sub-optimal". Of course it migh well be that I'm missing some important point or that I'm completely wrong. Take these remarks just as sample of what an average user might feel when approaching FriCAS.
Please do not be upset or hurted!!! ...and also PLEASE do not ask me to fix all these issues for you :) By """"user"""" below I mean a person with good mathematical skills, minimal computer skills, high aesthetical sense, and very very limited patience to fix things. (Sorry, but users are done this way, I know my colleagues...) I understand that the fricas project needs developers, but capturing a lot of users is a good way to interest (young) developers. (See PS at bottom page.) 1) INSTALL. Well, by definition, NO user will ever manually compile a source code. Furthermore a user has no virtual machines and just one working environment which she does not want to screw up if something goes wrong. The fricas binaries I downloaded worked, but an average user has to figure out how to proceeed with the tar file. A step by step "for dummies" explanation is important. (This is missing in INSTALL-bin.txt) . I'm at higher computer level so to me the problem was hate for manual install and paranoia, so I had to take the time to read the tar contents (I did not like to have usr and usr/local system directories in the tar), write a script that untars, installs, and creates hashes of all files to check for corruption. This took time... COMPARE with (eg debian's) """ $ aptitude install axiom """ which in seconds installs everything with no problems of reading instructins, broken installs, broken environment, security, and with a guarantee of future automatic upgrades. Having linux packages is strategic. I've seen here and there on fricas-devel remarks about having debian packages soon but after months I do not see the packages in debian repository. Having Mac/Windows installers would be surely helpful, but I do not know how difficult it is, so I stop here. 2) WEBSITE(S). The site fricas.sourceforge.net is simple and effective but it refers to a "fricas wiki" (axiom-wiki.newsynthesis.org) and to a "fricas API" (http://fricas.github.io/api/genindex.html). The site fricas.github.io looks nice, and modern the API is as well very good and modern (but it does not include all, where are the system commands??). Had a good impression so I started browsing it, discovering that there is more information. Happy but now confused, "what is official and what not official"? The axiom-wiki.newsynthesis.org contains a lot of useful information but (sorry to the maintainer!) looks old-fashioned, weakly mantained, and unstructured: in practice it is difficult to extract information the first times. What human being can take profit of this page: http://axiom-wiki.newsynthesis.org/FrontPage/contents ? (I must say that after 3 weeks of browsing there I've just discovered the http://axiom-wiki.newsynthesis.org/SiteIndex glossary, which is much helpful that the contents page. I know I know the "Site index" link is just below the "Content index" but I am a user so I'm dumb! ) Well, no big problems here but my advice is that there should be just one website (possibly modern and nice-looking like fricas.github.io) with all the relevant infomation structured in an accessible wayy. COMPARE with www.sympy.org : beautiful, no comparison... 3) ONLINE SHELL. Not strategic but many CAS have it. Writing \begin{axiom}\end{axiom} at each command is *TEDIOUS*. Furthemore I couldn't find a way to enlarge the window. COMPARE with http://maxima-online.org/ http://live.sympy.org/ .... 4) Latex friendly GUI. It is *important*!!! The 2D output of fricas kernel is difficult to read. (BTW I would definitely prefer a plain output equal to the input form but I cannot find how to do it. Fortran or the weird script-stuff are not useful for plain reading of results.) Users want to see nice formulas! I looked for information... nothing of official. I digged more and more and I found the following: --- Texmacs has a built-in fricas plug-ins. Problem here: texmacs is kicked out of debian because of dependency on guile. So I took the time to read inatsll instructions and I've installed the binaries ... and it did not work. Result: 2 hours wasted in trials. Anyway, I'm confident that one day might work, but my **personal** opinion is that using texmas to output CAS results is like using a termonuclear bomb to kill the mosquitos in your bedroom. The good alternative is Jupyter: Mathematica-like, modern, supported, widely known and relatively light. so.... --- I went to the official list of jupyter kernels, https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-kernels and I found ... NOTHING apart an old, apparently unmantained IAldor project https://github.com/mattpap/IAldor Disappointed I spent more time and more time in googling around and I discovered Kurt Parentani's nilqed projects.... --- The project fricas_jupyter (with binaries) looked interesting but one is required to have binaries compiled with SBCL 1.2.x . Unfortunately the official released binaries are made with sbcl 1.1.1 so I dropped this solution. --- The whole day of yesterday was spent in trying to figure out how to install fricas_kernel.py, which is a wrapper around the ipython kernel. The messy instructions there are scaring but the idea looked good (and I had a free day), so I tried to understand what to do. I have a modern Jupyter on python3. I soon realised that the python libraries IPython.kernel used in the file are deprecated and I took the time to read the endless python documentation to understand what to do (no real user will ever do that). Finally, I trivially modified the fricas_kernel.py file by blindly updating the module names (IPython.kernel -> ipykernel) . Moreover I did not know the python libraries used in the setup file and I wanted a clean global install for the json file, so I wrote my own simplified but transparent install... After some time I managed to have a notebook with a nice "fricas" label show at top but, alas, NO output. @Kurt (if around) forgive me! this is not a blame on your nice project but just to say that a user wasted his time for nothing: these accidents make people run away and should be avoided. COMPARE: sympy (OK it is python so using ipython requires NO effort). Maxima has many acceptable latex friendly GUIs: texmacs, wxmaxima, cantor (KDE) which are packaged in linux: no effort. My unprofessional opinion is that an interface with Jupyter kernel is strategical and should not be too difficult. 5) DOCUMENTATION. The first problem I faced here is confusion on which source use. fricas.sourceforge.net shows a pdf of what now I know being a "Jenks Sutor book". Furthermore I follow the link to the wiki and I find what looks like the same thing in html (two sites, how do I know that they are equivalent?) Ok but browsing the wiki I discover the axiom-developer website by T Daly and ther I find many volumes with similar but not identical information. All these books start with the same Axiom first page. Confused, I go to fricas.github.io and I discover a nice-looking book.pdf which at the beginning has a message which basically says (in scaring red) something like, by memory, "this is the official fricas book but unfortunately it is a work in process, so anything my be wrong" which I interpret as "STAY AWAY". (Did not work, I must say.) Having a documentation in pdf and html is strategical (even better if these contents are the same...). COMPARE with the beautiful reference guide of maxima http://maxima.sourceforge.net/docs/manual/maxima.html or the tutorial of sympy http://docs.sympy.org/latest/tutorial/index.html where anybody can modify and execute the code via the browser. So to summarize... If you want to stop giving a "USERS-STAY-AWAY" impression, the easiest strategical points I would suggest you to develop are: -- avoid reduncancies and move all information to one nice-looking website, maybe fricas.github.io -- improve the fricas documentation (may be with a dev full version and one incomplete but reliable version) -- capture linux users by distributing packages -- give a reliable, latex-friendly GUI with Jupyter Cheers ric PS The other way to capture (unpaid) developers I see, is to have an appeling project where they could have fun and learn a lot. I see that sympy has many gsoc students. My unprofessional impressions is that learning Boot, Lisp and SPAD nowadays is not very motivating nowadays. Is there a loooong term goal of porting FriCAS to Aldor or e.g. to more known functional languages like Haskell (which in 1-2 years will have dependent types), its "son" Idris (which has dependent types) ? In any case the fricas website should show a "long term goal" ... it gives an impression of quite serious intentions. PS2 Thanks to Waldek and Ralf for their recent replies to my question on evaluation. -- 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 fricas-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to fricas-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
