Re: [Axiom-developer] literate programming and Claerbout's Insight

[Franz Lehner]

On Sun, 29 Jul 2007, Alasdair McAndrew wrote:
> It may be that the negative views of Axiom are simply due to Axiom
> being very poorly (read "not at all") marketed - there are no
> elementary books about the use of Axiom, and if you go to the Axiom
> website, it is hard to find introductory beginner's or tutorial
> articles.
IMHO the problem are not tutorials, but reference.
)di op operator
)sh domain
are nice but only helpful for the expert.
Somehow the ++ documentation present in the algebra files should make it 
to the terminal as well.

I held a "computer mathematics" class for first year mathematics students 
last year, which was meant to give the students an overview over available 
computer tools, presenting latex, maple, mathematica, matlab/octave, and 
axiom.
Before handing out individual homework assignments at the end, I 
circulated a list and asked them to tell me their favourite CAS.
Out of 44 students, I got the following distribution:

Maple       30
Mathematica  2
Octave      10
Axiom        2

The main argument for maple was the extensive help system with many useful 
examples and the vast number of examples available on the web (well this 
is another bootstrap problem ...); and of course in the first year maple 
is the most useful system for symbolic linear algebra.

> Another problem - which I see as major - is that there is no native
> windows version with documentation (HyperDoc) and graphics.
This is indeed a major problem.
I was surprised that even in this audience, where I expect computer 
literacy to be above average, out of 44 students only 2 were not using 
windows ... 1 Mac, 1 Linux.
In the end at least one of them installed linux just because of axiom ...

regards,
Franz