Well said. My own general interest resides in mechanisms that could possibly reduce the entry-effort price.
Now that I gave World Scientific the OK to go to print with "Einstein's Apple", I'm getting some free time to resume exploring some ideas. Cheers, Gene On 12/25/2014 1:40 AM, d...@axiom-developer.org wrote: > Eugene, > > I only have an official position on Axiom. > > > > >> The basic issue that I see is that PanAxiom is really a >> software engineering project before it can continue to live. > > Making Axiom "live" is the WHOLE point of the Literate Programming effort. > > Currently you need have a deep knowledge of computation, mathematics, > Spad, and Lisp to use Axiom efficiently. Axiom needs to communicate > ideas behind those implementations at all levels so that it can be > maintained and modified. > > If you just want a copy of the system for your own use then there > is no reason to bother with natural language. When you stop then > your work dies. Exactly zero people care. > > > > > >> A significant part its development was thoroughly documenting >> what it did and how it did it. > > And "WHY" it was done. Even with my own code, after 20 years, > I know WHAT I did and HOW I did it. I can even tell you what > bytes the compiler will lay down in memory.... I just don't > remember "WHY", only that if I remove it the system breaks. > > Axiom isn't trying to "document", it is trying to COMMUNICATE ideas > from human to human. This is NOT a subtle difference. When you read > a physics textbook the natural language paragraphs explain the ideas, > not the equations. Imagine how useless a physics textbook would be > if all you had was a book of equations. > > Source code is equations. Axiom is trying to write the text > surrounding the equations. > > The literate programming focus is for the next generation, people we > will never meet who want to maintain, modify, and extend the system. > People die (Jenks, Bronstein, Sundarasan), which makes it hard to > get answers. > > Writing new source code without a full explanation just makes the > same fundamental mistake the Axiom team made in the last century. > In our defense, we were doing research, not product development. > > Now we have the benefit of hindsight and the prospect of a future. > New "source code equations" need to have the paragraphs that > communicate the ideas. > > Writing the ideas is tedious but it is MUCH harder to reverse engineer > the ideas from the equations, if it can be done at all. A lot of the > details in Spad code exist nowhere in the literature. Theory papers > rarely explain how to cons up an s-expression and funcall it to > dynamically compute the result. > > Axiom is trying to set professional quality standards for computational > mathematics software based on COMMUNICATION with future computational > mathematicians, developers, and users. > > The "gold standard" form of Axiom can be found in the book > "Physically Based Rendering" by Pharr and Humphries. When Axiom > looks like that we will have achieved a minimum professional > standard for Axiom as computational mathematics. > > > > > >> Even minimal documentation efforts may either hard to start or >> will be too much bother with to add or maintain. Besides who needs it? > > Axiom has about 1.2 million lines of code. It has taken years, so far, > just to organize, hyperlink, index, and automate. The "minimal > documentation effort" has been massive but progress is being made. > There are still 200,000 lines of code to rewrite and merge which > will consume most of next year, at minimum. > > Nobody currently needs documentation. But documentation is part > of being a software professional. Quality software is easy to > understand, easy to use, and has "to the point" documentation. > > Axiom is expanding the available documentation. There are more > )help files, there are now code examples shown with )d op responses, > there are full hypertext index lookups in each book, there are input > files in specific areas (e.g. Hamiltonian Biquaternions, the Cohen > algebra with references to the book, database query language > example, etc.), with more to come. > > There is a book outlining related theory that is being organized > with hyperlinks to the related algebra. There are SVG graphs with > hyperlinks to the algebra. There are hyperlinks within the algebra > to other categories, domains, or packages used. There is a website > with historical papers that will eventually be hyperlinked from > the current bibliography book. > > There is a computer algebra test suite based on published books > that show Axiom being used and tested by outside literature. > > So there is a "documentation" effort as well as a literate > programming effort. > > > >> "I didn't know I needed to know archeology." > > Charybdis is the equation output formatting program from the > 1960s. The zipper parser for algebra input is a research effort from > the 70s. The type system is inspired by Sammet's Modula and other > early ideas. What was cutting edge research 50 years ago is now > archeology. What is cutting edge research now will be archeology in 50 > years, assuming the work is written up and published. > > > > >> 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. > > Last month I attended a Knuth talk. I asked him about literate > programming. He said that he believed he could not have written > the MMIX simulator without it because it was too complex for him. > He considers literate programming to be one of his most important ideas. > > Knuth has the luxury of writing literate programs from scratch. We > have the horror of understanding "source code equations", reverse > engineering the ideas, and the communicating that understanding in > natural language. > > I believe literate programming is the only tool that can make software > live, especially complex software like Axiom. > > If Axiom is going to live, it must be done... > I want Axiom to live. Therefore... > > Tim > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming! The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. 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