Re: [Axiom-developer] life and death

[Ondrej Certik]

> I find it frustrating to watch yet-another-CAS being born.
> There are 30 years and hundreds of man-years invested in a
> system the size of Axiom. No single person, and likely no single
> group, is going to get the long-term, expensive support to do
> this again from scratch. There are no funding visionaries left.
>
> So the issue isn't really python-vs-spad. The issue is whether
> you care to spend your time writing code that will die or code
> that will live.

I care to spend my time working on something, that I can actually use
to help me do what I wanted, in my case I wanted to play with the
differential geometry and stuff in quantum field theory. And also I
wanted to have something very simple to understand and callable from a
popular high level language.

I cannot use Axiom as I would spent more time creating a python
bindings than writing everything from scratch. And also, as I wrote in
some other email, I spent most of the time not reinventing something,
that you already wrote, but by designing the interface, and the
interface is completely different from Axiom. I thought that the
difficult part is to make everything work, but that is not true, the
difficult part is to think, how the interface should look like.

I am already repeating myself, so I think I already said all my
opinions on this issue, but I really think that what is needed is a
CAS that could be used as a library in some major language. And I fear
that Axiom couldn't easily be used this way.

Ondrej