On Tuesday, November 4, 2014 2:48:02 PM UTC-8, Joachim Durchholz wrote: > > Am 04.11.2014 um 20:36 schrieb Richard Fateman: > > > > > > On Tuesday, November 4, 2014 1:02:54 AM UTC-8, Joachim Durchholz wrote: > >> > >> > >> Obviously, Red Hat does not exist in your reality. > >> > > It does; don't they deliver Pizza? > > Oh, sorry,. yes I heard of them. > > Um... well... if that's the level at which you're going to discuss FOSS, > I guess I don't mind. > > > I think the prospects for my making some constructive comments here > > are non-zero, even if I'm argumentative. > > Yeah, but that argumentativeness is somewhat grating, which means > everybody who's answering to you has to overcome some drain. > Working around the harshness, trying to stay polite, looking through the > words to isolate the actual substance... this takes time, energy, and > goodwill, and these resources are sapped eventually. > > Frankly, after our initial clash, I have been trying to hold back and > see whether others find your comments more helpful. Now that Aaron (an > extremely patient and friendly guy) is showing nerve, I concluce I'm not > the only one who finds your style... well, suboptimal. > > > There is a tendency for people > > doing Sage or sympy to be unaware of the previous efforts in the field, > > and to therefore repeat the design errors that have been mentioned in > > the open literature. > > Yeah, but the question "which design errors" was answered with "I'm not > going to do your homework". Which is okay, but then your statement is > just general advice, already well-known (I happen to be graduated and a > software architect thank you very much, others probably have as well)... > so you're not adding value or knowledge that isn't already there. > > > So you are free to ignore my advice, write programs that reproduce > > the design flaws of Mathematica, Maxima, Maple, ... I have no problem > > if you give them away, especially with a BSD style license. > > Yes, but you can't even name any design flaws. > You can read my published reviews of macsyma and mathematica. The first was in a IEEE Trans on Expert Systems; The other in J. Symbolic Computing. They are both online, free from my home page.
> Plus, your advice essentially amounted to "redo it in Lisp". I'm not sure I said that -- but if you are rewriting a program it i s a good opportunity to look at the old one, see if/why it is complicated and if you could make your program better. It is always a temptation to write the program that does the easy 80% and not notice there' more that has to be done. Also that doing the other 20% increases the program size considerably. Which isn't > entirely unreasonable, but outside the list of available options (I > suspect those with Lisp inclination are already active in doing symbolic > math in Lisp). > (I'm also quite sceptical about Lisp, because it's all power to the > developer and no guarantees to the maintainer, and I do not think that's > a viable option in the long term unless you can guarantee that every > coder on the project is top-notch, but that's just a tangent). > I don't follow. If you think Lisp is a "write-only" language and can't be read by maintainers, do you have some evidence to this effect? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" 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/sympy. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/1928a9ef-359e-49a8-8f0c-0d041042c577%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
