[HN Gopher] Maxima (Software) ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-11-20 23:00 UTC)