Re: [Axiom-developer] [fricas-devel] documentation standards

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 5:31 PM, Eugene Surowitz <address@hidden> wrote:

Ralf is only telling it as it is,
but I wish I could be even as pessimistic as him.

This is a crisis disguised as another documentation squabble.
As I see the status of PanAxiom:

OpenAxiom - One developer - little to no activity = dead branch.

Not really -- but YMMV.

 

FriCAS    - One developer - one developer - system being devolved.
Axiom     - One developer - when he goes Axiom goes.

The basic issue that I see is that PanAxiom is really a
software engineering project before it can continue to live.
It brings to mind the Whirlwind project that turned the
early hacked-up computer-like light-bulb testers into
engineering standard replicable devices and spawned an industry.
A significant part its development was thoroughly documenting
what it did and how it did it.

>From the posts over the last year or so, I get these messages:

Even minimal documentation efforts may either hard to start or
will be too much bother with to add or maintain. Besides who needs it?
As one young lady that I had set to maintaining a large system
with many undocumented changes to it said:
"I didn't know I needed to know archeology."

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.

Oh, and PanAxiom has no systematic development of basic numerology.

Xmas, Gene




On 12/24/2014 1:24 PM, Martin Baker wrote:

On 24/12/14 18:12, Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
 > It's open source development so I don't have to agree with you and can
 > choose to invest my time into something that doesn't make me unhappy.

I strongly agree with Ralf on this documentation issue.

Martin

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