[HN Gopher] Maxima (Software)
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       Maxima (Software)
        
       Author : Tomte
       Score  : 35 points
       Date   : 2021-11-20 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | bruce343434 wrote:
       | I actually use maxima as a faster wolframalpha alternative. It
       | doesn't look as polished but it gets the job done when solving or
       | simplifying most equations.
        
         | jart wrote:
         | I use IBM Scratchpad for the same reason. I like to be able to
         | write shell scripts to simplify and solve things. I also like
         | that it can turn math into FORTRAN that I can copy and paste
         | into a C program. I think you can probably do it using
         | Mathematica Kernel but I haven't figured out yet how to run it
         | in a shell script.
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | The wx-maxima[1] is a good GUI for maxima. A very nice mature
       | FLOSS symbolic math package. For derivatives, integrals,
       | simplification and many other uses I don't think it is nowhere
       | weaker than proprietary alternatives.
       | 
       | [1] https://wxmaxima-developers.github.io/wxmaxima/
        
         | riedel wrote:
         | SMath is a nice mathcad like interface with Maxima support
        
       | pfortuny wrote:
       | I use this frequently for plotting planar vector fields: it is
       | much better than Mathematica's StreamPlot (which I am forced to
       | use from time to time).
       | 
       | Also another colleague found out the hard way that maxima can
       | happen to solve symbolic/arithmetic linear equations much faster
       | (2 orders of magnitude) than Mathematica.
       | 
       | A great tool. A pity it is underestimated.
        
         | bitwize wrote:
         | Ironic, considering that Stephen Wolfram insisted in the 80s
         | that Lisp was 100x slower than C, and so a fast mathematics
         | package could not be written in it.
        
           | p_l wrote:
           | He was wrong then and now, but the crucial speedup of
           | Mathematica vs Maxima was difference in modeling of data and
           | how Mathematica could piggy back on fortran libraries for
           | numerical solving, while Maxima focused on symbolic solving.
           | 
           | This meant that for many cases where numerical method was
           | beneficial, Mathematica easily won on speed.
        
       | etaioinshrdlu wrote:
       | It says that Maxima also has its own programming language
       | (written in Lisp). Any opinions on it good or bad?
        
         | reikonomusha wrote:
         | It's a rather plain language. Nothing too special about it. Has
         | functions, variables, assignment, loops, and a few other
         | rudiments.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | rexpress wrote:
         | It's been a few years since I used Maxima, which was at
         | university but without much introduction to the language. The
         | dynamic scoping was a particularly unpleasant surprise, lexical
         | scoping was not available which lead to buggy behaviour. I
         | returned to the warm embrace of Mathematica fairly quickly.
        
         | mkl wrote:
         | It's more like Maxima _is_ a programming language. Its syntax
         | is weird, archaic, and clunky, and different from anything else
         | you 've ever used for no reason except that it dates back to
         | 1968, before C, before Pascal. Assignment uses ":", blocks of
         | statements use "(" and ")", etc. Aside from the syntax, its
         | features are mostly pretty basic and standard, and apart from
         | mathematics quite limited.
        
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