Re: [Axiom-developer] letting my mud settle

[C Y]

--- Jay Belanger <address@hidden> wrote:

> 
> > *,
> 
> That's wild enough to include me.  I really don't have anything to
> contribute, but I thought I should delurk sometime.

Hey Jay! :-).  Glad to see you on the list.  

> It's probably largely due to hindsight and seeing how things turned
> out, but rewriting it in the pamphlet files was a fantastic thing.
> I can see how it could cause an opinion war, though.

Heh - a common thread between academics and open source ;-).
 
> > in the process of building the system and the Makefile tree i spent
> > a lot of time thinking about my past sins (and suffering from them
> > which is poetic justice).
> 
> I'm too clueless to even dream of commenting on past sins, but if
> they led, even indirectly, to where things are going now, I don't 
> think sins is the right word.

Agreed!

> > we can't do that now. and we can't do it in boot. the system is too
> > damn complex and badly designed/written/structured. construction is
> > always dirty, disruptive, and time consuming. i'm sorry that you'll
> > get to see my ugly hacking along the way. but, hey, that's open
> > source programming.
> 
> Seeing your "ugly hacking" may well be a good thing.  As a teacher, I
> try to make clear to my students that not everything starts off clean
> and polished; that leads to false sense of how things are really
> done, and can easily make good students feel inadequate. 
> ("This works great, but it seems to have been pulled out of thin 
> air.  I could certainly never come up with anything like this.")

Been there a few times.

> > i'm going to fix axiom.
> 
> How "broken" is it?  I'm working my way through the Axiom book, but
> haven't gotten very far yet.  (Whatever happened to the plans to
> publish it?  I would love to have a copy.  Right now I'm printing a
> few pages at a time to read.)  I would like to encourage people here
> to use it in class.

There was a wiki page set up here:
http://page.axiom-developer.org/zope/mathaction/AxiomBook

Tim and Bill, is that still in the works?  If we want to get the first
volume out the door soon I'd be glad to pitch in some effort to get it
ready.

> > i know how to get there from here.
> > it takes time.
> > it takes work.
> > it takes patience.
> >
> > and once this is done there is SO much more to do.
> > why, the algebra restructuring alone will take years...
> 
> A finished, polished Axiom would be nice.  But I've always enjoyed
> playing around with things trying to get them to work. Hopefully,
> I'll be able to help sometime in the near future.  (I only have about
> 10,000 pages left to read in the Axiom book.)

Heh.  It gets more tolerable when compared to Maxima, where if we want
to read a book on it we have to write it first ;-)

Cheers,
CY 



        
                
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