Typically the best system to use is the one that your colleagues (in the same application area, or company, or school) are using.
In the case of a textbook for electrical engineering graduate students, I would expect them to know Matlab. They might know FORTRAN. They might know Python. They probably don't know Lisp, but that is irrelevant since a Maxima user doesn't need to know or use Lisp. The Maxima front-end language and system should be compared to some sympathetic Python front end for congeniality. Maybe the comparison should be to Sage rather than sympy? If the role of the text is to be an introduction to a scientific ecosystem (not what was said, but anyway...) I think Matlab or its free clones might be in the competition. Depends on the audience, really. And if the intent is to just make pretty pictures or short math/computer lang segments, it really doesn't matter much. RJF On Monday, January 12, 2015 at 4:07:43 PM UTC-8, bastian.weber wrote: > > Sorry if this post might be slightly offtopic, > > Situation: > > A (generalized) colleague is working on a book. Intended audience are > graduate students of electrical engineering. The book treats concepts > like vector fields, differential forms, (linear and nonlinear) > coordinate transforms, null spaces, etc. The author wants to provide > some "illustrations" of the treated concepts by means of short > computer-algebra snippets. Currently he uses maxima. > > From my point of view, the combination of IPython notebook and sympy > would be a better choice. So I am collecting arguments, which should be > covered by reliable information, to finally convince him (in the best > case). > > Status: Until now I only found > > [1] https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/SymPy-vs.-Maxima > > which seems to be quite neutral, i.e., it does not reflect my personal > experience that the usage of sympy is much more intuitive. > > > Questions: > > 1. Are there any documents available, comparing sympy and maxima in > terms of: > > a) features ([1] does this on a quite abstract level) > b) development activity > c) community size > d) documentation coverage > e) test coverage > f) subjective "usability experience" (maybe internal consistency, module > compatibility) > > > 2. What would be other arguments for/against Sympy (together with > IPNotebook and Python)? > > I started to collect my thoughts here: > > [2] https://github.com/basweber/sympy/wiki/sympy_vs_maxima > > Best regards, > > Bastian > -- 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/ce0160c8-94ba-4d6d-9581-a787d9c50bca%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
